Mongolian filmmaker Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir speaks to Novastan about filming Ulaanbaatar, the country’s apartment obsession, masculinity and spirituality, and why contemporary Mongolia needs to be seen as more than folklore.

International images of Mongolia are still dominated by the steppe: horses, yurts, nomadic herders and vast landscapes. The films of Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir look somewhere else.

Her characters inhabit apartment blocks, bedrooms, cars, schools and the sprawling neighbourhoods of Ulaanbaatar. They worry about housing and money, negotiate sex and relationships, struggle with expectations placed on young men and women, and move between a rapidly changing urban Mongolia and older cultural and spiritual reference points.

Read more on Novastan: “Mongolia cannot be understood through one lens”: Dr. Mendee Jargalsaikhan on democracy, China and Central Asia

Purev-Ochir has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Mongolian cinema. After studying film direction and screenwriting, she attracted international attention with the shorts Mountain Cat, Snow in September and A South-Facing Window. Her first feature, City of Wind, continued her exploration of young Mongolians navigating the tensions between modern urban life, family, desire and spirituality.

Yet her films are not simply portraits of Ulaanbaatar. Purev-Ochir describes the city itself as something difficult to capture: a place that, on screen, repeatedly becomes an “inner landscape”. Her interest lies in transitions – between adolescence and adulthood, intimacy and isolation, the physical and spiritual worlds, and different ways of imagining what it means to be Mongolian.

These tensions are also playing out on a much larger scale. Mongolia has experienced extraordinarily rapid transformations across successive generations: communism, democratisation, globalisation and now the internet and artificial intelligence. Ulaanbaatar’s relentless expansion has made housing both an aspiration and a source of frustration, while the country’s international image remains closely associated with a nomadic culture from which many urban Mongolians have become physically removed.

Read more on Novastan: “The idea of having choices was so new”: Oyungerel Tsedevdamba on Mongolia’s democracy 36 years later

For Purev-Ochir, cinema offers a way to explore these contradictions without resolving them. Speaking to Novastan, she discusses why apartment ownership has become the Mongolian “dream and nightmare”, why she worries that Mongolians themselves are orientalising their culture, what shamanism means in contemporary urban life, and why she hopes a new generation might eventually imagine a different relationship between Mongolia’s cities and countryside.

Novastan: Before we talk about the films themselves, could you tell us a little about your own path into filmmaking? What was your background, when did cinema become something you wanted to pursue seriously, and were there particular filmmakers, writers, artists or experiences that shaped you early on?

Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir: Apart from the initial decision to study filmmaking, which was full of psychological drama because I was cutting ties with what my parents had envisioned for my future, I had a pretty straightforward and traditional path in filmmaking.

I studied for my bachelor’s in film direction and master’s in screenwriting, and subsequently, upon graduating from my master’s, I made two short films which did very well at festivals. My first feature film, City of Wind, came out exactly five years after my graduation. I had written the script during my master’s in screenwriting.

I made the decision to go into filmmaking and not pursue medicine like my mother because watching films and thinking about them was one of the only true pleasures in my life. I couldn’t imagine my early adulthood doing anything else and made the “bold” – or lazy – decision to go into filmmaking.

When I made this decision, I was purely a film watcher. I had no knowledge about how films were made, no idea about montage, and no previous idea of what a film set was like.

How would you describe yourself as a filmmaker today? What kinds of stories, characters or tensions do you find yourself returning to, and what do you think you are still trying to understand through cinema?

I’ve noticed so far through my films that I wish to capture transitions and states of movement with cinema – specifically in the inner worlds and impressions of people. People who are more at war with themselves and their feelings than with external characters. Or people whose inner states are conflicting with exterior states, and the transition between these states.

I like these transitory situations and feelings and contradictions. I prefer autumn and spring to summer and winter, for example. Autumn and spring are seasons that fight with themselves; there is tension and vast change from day to day and even between day and night.

In Mongolia in autumn, it can feel like summer in the day and winter at night. There is conflict in temperatures, in expression and in affect. These seasons feel more reflective and reflexive. I think with cinema, I wish to capture something seasonal like this.

Across the three shorts, Ulaanbaatar seems to change with the age and situation of your characters. In Mountain Cat it is a place of adolescence and possibility, in Snow in September it feels more enclosed and unsettling, and in A South-Facing Window adulthood seems almost physically trapped by apartments, traffic and financial pressure. Do you see these films as capturing different stages of growing up in the same city?

I think it could be said like that. It’s true that the characters in my films are growing up – my next film is about a man in his mid-30s.

On a different note, I find Ulaanbaatar strangely difficult to “capture” on camera. It’s a wide, steppe city spread out across a large valley. Even neighbourhoods which are more enclosed feel open and exposed.

I feel that on the screen Ulaanbaatar is not very geometric and more landscape-like. And it gives a feeling of something more timeless and affective rather than something specific and geographic.

I tried to depict Ulaanbaatar this way – to make it very characteristic and to connect its different spaces to different plot points and characters. But try as I might, the city always feels more like an inner landscape than an active location.

In A South-Facing Window, the couple seem to be searching for a better life through real estate – visiting empty apartments and imagining another home. You have also described an apartment in central Ulaanbaatar as part of a kind of “Mongolian dream”. What interested you about housing as a symbol of aspiration, and do you think that dream still captures what younger Mongolians want today?

Housing is the Mongolian Dream/Nightmare par excellence.

Because of our nomadic background, the idea of real estate as individual wealth is relatively new. I think my grandparents’ generation was the first generation that slowly started to pursue living in apartments because it was more “civilised” and meant that you were part of the state – only state workers got apartments then.

At the moment, all Mongolians are attempting to buy apartments because it’s an absolute “must” of modern life. And somehow it is thought of as the solution to all modern problems, as a status symbol, and a sign that everything is “alright”.

When, on the contrary, the cause of all of Ulaanbaatar’s problems is this inflated housing sector and rampant construction fever.

Read more on Novastan: Keeping the heat in: Mongolia’s overlooked answer to Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution

I think only when this “greed” for apartments finishes will a new “dream” for Mongolians appear. And hopefully our New Mongolian Dream will be a dream that focuses on the countryside and our nomadic core.

I don’t think we will ever be alright as a country and as a people unless we are nomadic in some form or another. This new form has to be dreamt of and created. The traditional nomadic way of living is too far outside the new generations’ reality.

But I know of many under-30 Mongolians who want to live in the countryside, outside of the fever that is Ulaanbaatar, myself included. So this “dream” is slowly changing.

Your films pay enormous attention to physical space: Soviet apartment blocks, ger districts, cars, bedrooms, unfinished or empty apartments. How consciously do you use architecture and urban space to reveal class, intimacy or power between people?

I think space is connected to the inner lives of my characters. How my characters relate to the spaces they find themselves in is part of how they feel about themselves and how they position themselves in the world.

The spaces are not just a place where the stories are set. They’re part of the characters and their truths.

In Snow in September, the intimate encounter between Davka and the older woman is deeply uncomfortable because the imbalance of power is obvious, yet the film never over-explains it. You have spoken about realising that “the camera was a weapon” when deciding how to film that scene. Has making that film changed how you think about the ethics of showing intimacy, particularly when working with young actors?

This film helped me understand the relationship between the camera and me as the filmmaker – to understand some things about my presence and my voice. About film as a responsibility, but also as a language.

Images are part of the grammar of what I am “saying” with the film, so I must be precise with them. And be aware of what I am saying, when I am saying it, how I am saying it, and why I am saying it.

Hopefully as I age and mature, this relationship between me and the camera becomes clearer to me and my films become more “precise”.

Male vulnerability appears in striking ways in your films. Davka in Snow in September is inexperienced and manipulated, while Shagai in A South-Facing Window seems frustrated, insecure and unable to articulate what is happening to his marriage. Are you particularly interested in forms of masculinity that do not fit more conventional images of Mongolian men?

I think because I am a female filmmaker, I will always depict masculinity from a non-orthodox angle. I don’t think I am overtly interested in unconventional depictions of masculinity.

I think that my personal relationship to masculinity is quite flawed and filled with insecurity. And naturally it is felt in my films.

Interestingly, my next film includes the theme of masculinity. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the men in my life and my relationship to my son. And so let’s see how my next film turns out.

In Mountain Cat, shamanism is brought into a very ordinary contemporary setting rather than being presented as something exotic or separate from modern life. How does spirituality actually coexist with urban, educated and globally connected Mongolia in your own experience?

I heard some time ago that we are not physical beings that sometimes become interested in shamanism or spirituality or religion. On the contrary, we are spiritual beings dealing with a physical world. I quite agree with this.

I think before anything we are spiritual beings. Humans are innately spiritual. And to be connected to spirituality is a matter of “perspective” or “angle” or “choosing a timeline”, as the kids say.

Not just in Mongolia but throughout the world, living a spiritual life is a matter of closing your eyes and opening your eyes and choosing what you will experience and how you see things. It sounds overly simplistic, but profound things are actually quite simple.

I think Mongolians are very lucky in that we still have access to ancient practices that allow us to experience our spirituality. Modern Mongolians have this access and can turn to shamanism – comprised of spirit worship and nature worship – when the physical world is overwhelming or empty.

It’s not a choose-one-way-or-the-other kind of situation. We have access to the physical and the spiritual.

You have mentioned that your parents speak Russian while you and your sisters speak English, and that Korean has become increasingly attractive to younger Mongolians. What do these changing linguistic and cultural reference points tell us about generational change in Mongolia? Do they affect how generations understand one another?

Since my grandparents’ generation, major socio-political and cultural changes have happened – communism in my grandparents’ time, democracy during my parents’ time, globalism during my time, and now, in the newer generations, the internet and AI.

These are major shifts in the human experience and social order. Since the 1980s, each decade has been so different from the previous one that there is certainly a gap between the generations that ultimately translates into the question of identity.

My films are, in a way, an attempt at understanding and expressing our identity through our lived experiences and relationships.

Mongolia is still often represented internationally through the steppe, nomadism, horses and spectacular landscapes. Your films are much more interested in apartments, traffic, schools, bedrooms and the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar. Do you ever feel that simply showing ordinary urban Mongolia is itself a way of pushing back against how the country is imagined abroad?

I actually have a problem with how Mongolia is portrayed, not necessarily by foreigners, but by how we Mongolians portray ourselves.

We have started to glamorise and orientalise our own culture because that is what foreigners value. Our relationship to our culture is becoming a “simulation” because we are relating more with signs and symbols of what being a Mongolian means rather than actually having a lived relationship to our own culture.

I do push back against this idea and against the simplistic image that Mongolia has in the collective consciousness.

I wish Mongolia had a more humane and more literal presence in the collective consciousness – not like folklore. With my films, I aim to put Mongolia in the modern collective consciousness – as a real people, with a real country, and a real presence.

You have said that being away from Mongolia sometimes allows you to see the country more clearly. What changes in your relationship with Mongolia when you leave it – and what do you notice first when you come back?

I feel that my relationship to Mongolia is actually strengthened when I am away because I miss it and yearn for my family in Mongolia.

When I am away, I am able to think more deeply and in a more concentrated manner about the core ideas I have in my films. When I am in Mongolia, I am more distracted and de-centred. I am more inspired by the characters, the specific scenes, conversations, colours and smells.

So I feel that my relationship to my script and my film is enriched by the nomadic relationship I have with my country.

When I first go back, I am always transported back to when I was 10 years old – the first time I left the country. I feel that whenever I return, I return to the feelings of that girl – a girl who had never left Mongolia yet and who felt like no other place in the world existed or mattered.

Which Mongolian cultural work – a film, book, album, artist or even a place – do you wish more people outside Mongolia knew about, and why?

I wish that more people knew of the particular existence of the Gobi Desert. It’s a very fragile and harsh geography that produces the best singers of Mongolia.

Through song, the people survive and they soften the landscape and their lives.

I think many people have heard of the film The Story of the Weeping Camel. I think that this land has to be protected more, especially now with mining and uranium.

Read more on Novastan: Bolor Lkhaajav: “Mongolia does not need to choose between Russia and China”

It’s a vulnerable land, sparsely populated, so more care and attention must be given due to its fragility and exploitability.

By Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan English.

The post Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir: “Housing is the Mongolian dream – and nightmare” appeared first on Novastan English.

Born in Latvia and raised in Kazakhstan, Lena Wolf grew up with fragments of a history that Soviet society rarely discussed openly. In her graphic memoir, she retraces the deportation of her German family to Kazakhstan, their struggle to preserve language and identity, and her own journey from Aktobe to Germany.

For our readers in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan:

Lena Wolf’s e-book is now available at reduced regional prices on Google Play Books in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Available in English and Russian.

For much of her childhood, Lena Wolf believed that all Germans came from Kazakhstan.

Aktobe was home. Her grandmother cooked German dishes alongside baursaki and manti, organised clandestine religious gatherings and spoke German to her grandchildren, even when they answered her in Russian. Around them lived families whose own histories had been shaped by deportation, repression and displacement.

Yet Wolf also learned early that being German could set her apart.

“I don’t think I really understood what being German meant to other people until I was called a fascist for the first time,” she recalls. “I was probably about six.”

Decades later, Wolf began piecing together the family history that had reached her in fragments behind closed doors. The result was a graphic memoir illustrated by Christoph Heuer, tracing almost two centuries of migration, persecution and repeated attempts to build a home.

Her grandmother Emilia was 25 when she was deported to Kazakhstan in 1941 with two young children. Like many Soviet Germans, the family initially believed the displacement might be temporary.

“They left behind their houses, land, animals – everything – still hoping they would return,” Wolf says.

They never did.

Even after Stalin-era special-settlement restrictions were lifted in 1955, Soviet Germans were not allowed to return to the areas from which they had been deported. Emilia eventually built a new life in Aktobe.

“Kazakhstan did become home for her, partly because she knew she could never return to her village in Ukraine,” Wolf says. “She found her people there and had her family around her.”

The contradiction would become central to Wolf’s understanding of her family history: Kazakhstan was both a place of forced exile and the country in which several generations of the family made their lives.

“Somewhere along the way, she too became a German from Kazakhstan.”

Growing up German in Soviet Kazakhstan

For Wolf herself, Kazakhstan carried no such ambiguity during childhood.

“For me, Kazakhstan was simply home. I didn’t know anything else,” she says. “In fact, when I was very little, I thought all Germans came from Kazakhstan.”

Read more on Novastan: Beyond any borders: a new multicultural generation in Kazakhstan

Her family’s German identity nevertheless remained clearly marked in Soviet society.

Official documents continued to identify Soviet Germans as nemets or nemka, even as German-language education, religious life and much of the community’s institutional culture had been suppressed.

“You were expected to stop being German, but you were never allowed to forget that you were German,” Wolf says.

In her family, survival meant avoiding attention. Her father’s advice was encapsulated in the Russian expression тише воды, ниже травы – “quieter than water, lower than grass.”

“Don’t attract attention. Don’t stand out. That was how you survived.”

Wolf remembers the word “German” being routinely associated with “fascist”, decades after the Second World War. Soviet Germans’ own experience of deportation and repression was largely absent from the history taught in schools.

“When you don’t know the history, you fill the gaps with your own explanations,” she says. “So people assumed that because we had been deported, we must have been guilty. The deportation itself became proof of our guilt.”

As a child, she even changed her surname when helping an elderly Soviet woman whose husband and son had died during the war.

“I invented another name for myself: Volkova instead of Wolf.”

The Russian name, she says, became a form of protection.

When Russian became the common language

Language is another thread running through Wolf’s memoir.

Her grandmother spoke German to her; Wolf usually answered in Russian. She later recognised almost exactly the same pattern among Kazakh families: grandparents speaking Kazakh while younger generations responded in Russian.

“When that happens, it isn’t only language that gets lost,” Wolf says. “Stories, traditions and knowledge can no longer be passed on in the same way.”

She remembers receiving some Kazakh-language teaching at school but says it was far too limited for children to become proficient.

Russian, meanwhile, dominated education, television and popular culture.

“You didn’t necessarily have to force children to speak Russian,” she says. “Education, television, culture and opportunities were in Russian, while Kazakh was often seen as old-fashioned or backward. Of course children were going to choose Russian.”

Read more on Novastan: The Lexicon of Kazakh Decolonisation

Looking back, she says she is glad to see the Kazakh language gaining greater prominence today.

A garden as survival – and as home

One image reappears throughout Wolf’s family history: the garden.

Her ancestors had originally migrated eastward to work the land. After deportation, a garden helped her grandmother and a neighbour survive wartime shortages. Decades later, during Wolf’s own childhood in Kazakhstan, home-grown food helped sustain the family when Soviet shops were empty.

But the garden came to represent more than food.

Wolf recounts the story of her father, whose mother was sentenced to the Gulag after attempting to leave the deportation zone and return to Ukraine. He was sent to an orphanage in Zaporizhzhia shortly after the war.

One teacher once invited him to her home for dinner. While she cooked, he played in the garden with her son.

“He remembers standing there among the flowers and plants and realising, for the first time, that the world was beautiful,” Wolf says.

The memory remained with him throughout his life.

Now 91, he can no longer maintain a large garden but still cares for flowers on his balcony in Offenbach, Germany.

“Perhaps that is what a garden means in our family,” Wolf says. “It feeds you when there is nothing to eat, but it also gives you beauty when there isn’t much beauty around you. And wherever you end up, you can plant something and make that place your own.”

A ‘return’ to a country they did not know

In 1989, Wolf and her family left Kazakhstan for Germany.

Officially, such migration was often presented as a return to an ancestral homeland. In practice, Wolf discovered that Germany was another unfamiliar country.

“What surprised me most was that in Germany I wasn’t seen as German,” she says.

“After everything our families had gone through in the Soviet Union because they were German – persecution, discrimination and sometimes literally fighting for survival – we arrived in Germany and suddenly we were foreigners.”

At 17, Wolf initially tried to assimilate as completely as possible. She stopped speaking Russian, avoided food associated with her Soviet childhood and even began using the name Helene.

Inside the family home, however, the opposite transformation was taking place.

“In Kazakhstan my parents had tried to preserve what was German,” she recalls. “In Germany, suddenly they started cooking the food they missed from Kazakhstan – plov, beshbarmak, baursaki.”

Read more on Novastan: Between integration and inheritance: How Armenians in Uzbekistan are redefining community

Wolf eventually realised that Kazakhstan could not simply be removed from her identity.

“I am a German from Kazakhstan.”

It is a formulation she prefers to the widely used German term Russlanddeutsche, or “Russian Germans”.

Wolf points out that neither she nor her parents lived in Russia. Her family had lived in Ukraine before deportation to Kazakhstan, while earlier generations had been Germans of the Russian Empire.

“The term also hides how diverse these German communities actually were,” she says. Germans deported to Kazakhstan came from Ukraine, the Volga region, Crimea, the Caucasus and elsewhere.

“For myself, I simply say: I am a German from Kazakhstan.”

Turning fragments into a history

Wolf’s decision to tell the story as a graphic memoir was partly motivated by younger generations of her own family.

Her nieces and nephews had grown up in Germany knowing little about the experiences of their grandparents and great-grandparents. She wanted to make the history accessible without reducing its complexity.

Works such as Maus and Persepolis showed her that graphic narrative could make difficult histories accessible across generations.

Some experiences, she says, were also easier to communicate visually.

“I could describe in a few sentences how people were transported for weeks in overcrowded trains, cold and hungry, and how people died along the way. But I wanted readers to see their faces, the exhaustion, the desperation and the conditions in which they were deported.”

Illustrator Christoph Heuer eventually drew more than 1,200 panels by hand, reconstructing historical environments from photographs and other archival material.

For Wolf, the research also transformed her understanding of the stories her grandmother had told her.

As a child, she had regarded them almost as dangerous family secrets: accounts of famine, deportation and death that contradicted what was being taught publicly.

“Who do you believe – your grandmother or your country and your teachers?” Wolf asks. “That’s quite a big decision for a child to make.”

Researching the memoir made her realise not only how much her grandmother had told her, but how much she had withheld in an attempt to protect her.

It also changed Wolf’s understanding of resistance.

Her grandmother’s defiance was not dramatic. It meant continuing to practise religion in secret, speaking German to her grandchildren, preparing traditional food and preserving family memories despite decades of pressure to assimilate.

“Her resistance wasn’t loud,” Wolf says. “It was quiet and persistent.”

Writing the book ultimately turned inherited fragments into a coherent family history.

“I think I had to write this book to understand who I am,” she says.

The answer to the question that once troubled her – “Where are you from?” – now comes easily.

“My answer is very simple: I am a German from Kazakhstan. And now I know what came before me.”

By Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan English.

The post ‘I am a German from Kazakhstan’: Lena Wolf on deportation, memory and finding home appeared first on Novastan English.

Formed in Ulaanbaatar in 2023, Dotor Khuree blends Mongolian musical traditions with avant-pop, jazz, rock and other contemporary influences. In this interview with Novastan Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine, the band discusses its latest EP, the independent music scene in Ulaanbaatar and what it means to make distinctly Mongolian music today.

Mongolian music has gained growing international visibility in recent years, but outside the country it is still often associated primarily with the morin khuur, throat singing and other immediately recognisable traditional forms.

Ulaanbaatar-based band Dotor Khuree is exploring another path.

Formed in April 2023 by musicians who met at the Mongolian State University of Arts and Culture, the group describes its sound as avant-pop, post-ethno and poly-genre. Its members draw on Mongolian long song, regional folk traditions and the musical vocabulary of instruments such as the morin khuur, while largely expressing those influences through contemporary instrumentation.

The band released its debut LP, Zarimdaa Zuils, in September 2025, followed by the self-titled Dotor Khuree EP in May 2026. The latter pushed the musicians further towards what they describe as a distinctly Mongolian sound achieved without directly using traditional instruments.

Novastan spoke with the members of Dotor Khuree about Mongolian musical identity, experimentation, Ulaanbaatar’s independent scene and their ambitions beyond Mongolia.

Novastan: Could you introduce Dotor Khuree to readers who may be discovering you for the first time? How did the band come together, and what brought you to the kind of music you make today?

Dotor Khuree: Mandaa: Dotor Khuree was formed on 12 April 2023 and consists of six musicians and two crew members – our band manager and sound engineer – making eight members in total. We are an avant-pop, post-ethno, poly-genre band.

The band was first founded by our bassist Gombojav and me, Narmandakh, the keyboardist. We then started adding our other bandmates: vocalist Tsetsen, guitarist Orgil, sound engineer Enkhdalai, pianist Batzaya and drummer Chultemjamts. Our last addition was our band manager, Oyuntulkhuur, or Roxy.

The band members all met at the Mongolian State University of Arts and Culture and were already friends.

The main calling to start making the music we aim to make today began with my childhood and my deep love for Mongolian long songs and the morin khuur while growing up in the countryside. The older I got, the more that love grew, and I aspired to incorporate traditional musical elements into my own music.

After forming the band, I told the others about the kind of Mongolian music I wanted to make, and all our members received the idea with real enthusiasm. That was how the basis of Dotor Khuree’s present sound came to be.

Another important factor was definitely our university mentors and teachers, who inspired and encouraged us to stay close to our Mongolian musical roots and stressed the importance of contributing to their development. That was something that really stayed with us.

One of the things that immediately stood out to me was that your music can sound distinctly Mongolian even when you are using primarily contemporary instruments. How consciously do you think about creating a “Mongolian” sound?

Mandaa: It is definitely a very conscious decision. Because we all love Mongolian music so much, we strongly believe that it is entirely possible to make our sound distinctly Mongolian without using traditional instruments.

That is why we spend so much of our rehearsal time coming up with new ideas about how to achieve that. The song ideas usually come from me, and from there we collaborate as a team, discussing arrangements and musical timbres with the shared goal of creating a distinctly Mongolian sound using contemporary instruments.

We feel that this goal is now gradually coming to life. We are really happy that you noticed it.

What musical traditions, older songs or sounds from Mongolia have influenced Dotor Khuree most strongly? When you reinterpret traditional or older material, how do you decide what to preserve and what to transform?

Gomboo: So many Mongolian musical traditions influence us. Long songs, or urtiin duu, and the morin khuur have so many different varieties. The techniques and sounds vary from region to region: the far western regions of Mongolia have very distinctive sounds, while the Gobi provinces have something different again. That is always very inspiring.

Several of our songs reflect those nuances of Mongolian folk music and long song.

For example, when reinterpreting and rearranging the folk song Shiree Nuur, we made it sound nothing like the original. We shortened the lyrics, using only the first two lines and leaving more room for the listener’s interpretation. The song’s vocal accent in particular blended exceptionally well with our female vocalist’s tone.

Rather than directly copying tradition, we wanted to express it through our own unique musical language.

Could you tell us about your latest EP? What ideas connect the tracks, and how does it differ from your earlier work?

Gomboo: It is always interesting for us to make music using traditional vocal styles and a Mongolian feel, while adding our own modern elements. While making this kind of music, it almost feels as though something awakens within us.

In fact, the Dotor Khuree EP can be described as “our awakened spirit”. Through this EP, compared with our Zarimdaa Zuils LP, we express even more strongly our connection to our national culture and heritage – something that is always close to our hearts.

Roxy: On our debut LP, Zarimdaa Zuils, the band explored a wider range of genres, even dipping into jazz fusion and bossa nova, so the record is more poly-genre.

On the Dotor Khuree EP, the band continued exploring the original idea that began with songs such as Shiree Nuur and Ertnii Saikhan on the first LP. At its core, that has always been about creating a distinct Mongolian sound with a Dotor Khuree feel.

Is there a particular song on the EP that you feel best represents what Dotor Khuree is trying to do musically? Could you take us through how that track developed?

Mandaa: Every song on the EP expresses the direction we want to take with our future sound, but especially Ergen Dervene, the album intro.

The song includes many elements of Mongolian musical traditions, such as folk-song elements, ritual chants, biyelgee – traditional Mongolian dance rhythms – and circular dancing motifs.

The lyrics were co-written by singer Tsetsen and keyboardist Narmandakh, who also finalised the composition, while the entire band collaborated on the production.

The composition is vocal-oriented, with the voice playing the main role and the other musical instruments supporting the central melody.

Roxy: We also recently finished a very creative and interesting project translating the song’s lyrics into English, with help from our friend Unurjargal, who is a book and film translator – a big shout-out to her.

Her interpretation might give listeners even more insight into the song. She translated the title as Spreading Wings.

Another of our favourites is Nariin Saihan Heer. The lyrics come from a Mongolian folk song of the same name, but the music is an entirely new Dotor Khuree composition. The title translates as The Fine Bay Horse, but the meaning of the song goes much deeper.

There is often an expectation outside Mongolia that “Mongolian music” should involve instruments such as the morin khuur or techniques such as throat singing. Do you ever feel that international audiences have a narrow idea of what Mongolian music is supposed to sound like?

Roxy: I wouldn’t call it narrow, maybe just a little outdated, because the morin khuur and throat singing can themselves be used in so many different experimental ways, which sadly is not being done that much.

It is always important for artists to give listeners something they never expected.

What is the independent music scene in Ulaanbaatar like today? Are there particular venues, festivals, labels or communities that have been especially important in allowing alternative music to develop?

Mandaa: Ulaanbaatar has a small but active independent music scene.

There are live music venues such as NarBar Live House, Fat Cat Jazz Club and 78 MusicBar, festivals such as Playtime, music communities such as Sonsloo, and labels like Aydu Records, all contributing to the spread of contemporary sounds.

Do you feel that a recognisable contemporary Ulaanbaatar sound or musical identity is emerging, or is the scene too diverse to describe in those terms?

Mandaa: The scene has become more diverse in recent years, so it is definitely difficult to describe the sound in those terms because the artists are all so different.

I think the lyrics, regardless of the sound, will always remain distinctly unique, because it is very difficult to translate Mongolian poetry and phrasing into English or other languages while preserving their original depth.

How easy is it to sustain an independent band in Mongolia? What are the main practical challenges – recording, rehearsal spaces, venues, financing, reaching audiences?

Orgil: Of course, it is not easy to be an independent band in Mongolia. The biggest challenge is financial sustainability.

Some of our band members have full-time jobs alongside playing in the band. Even if our music gains more recognition and reaches more listeners, that does not guarantee us stable sponsorship.

Finding rehearsal spaces with good acoustics and monitoring setups is also a constant struggle, so we do our absolute best with what we have at the moment.

Maybe if we had enough funding, we could deliver higher-quality productions, record in professional studios and reach a much wider audience much faster.

Mongolia’s younger musicians have much greater access to music from around the world than previous generations did. How do international influences interact with local musical traditions in your own work and in the wider scene?

Orgil : Yes, that’s right. We also have many international musical influences, and we especially love listening to and studying different styles.

Most of our members have formal degrees in music composition and other music-related fields, which is probably one of our strengths. We also have a strong influence from academic and classical music.

However, we strive to master those techniques while remaining true to our core value, which is honouring and evolving our native heritage. That shared purpose is why I believe our sound is continually growing and refining its distinct identity.

To us, Mongolian music feels peaceful, open and expansive, whereas Western music often feels sharper, highly kinetic and harmonically complex.

Because traditional Mongolian music is pentatonic, it blends seamlessly with genres such as blues and rock. Meanwhile, fusing it with jazz, Latin and other contemporary styles produces truly distinctive, unconventional textures.

Moving forward, we will keep striving to spread our unique cultural heritage while making music that genuinely resonates with us and brings us joy.

Has the growth of international interest in Mongolian music changed the way musicians in Mongolia think about presenting themselves abroad? Is there a tension between what foreign audiences expect from Mongolia and what younger Mongolian artists actually want to create?

Tsetsen: Yes, I believe it has.

When our culture and emotions are expressed through music, I believe they carry a rich complexity of emotions as vast as the steppes. We are deeply grateful to all the artists who are sharing this sensibility with international audiences and reshaping the way people hear Mongolian music.

What artists create and envision does not always align with audience expectations – sometimes it matches, and sometimes it diverges. It has always been like that. This is probably because every work emerges from a different perspective and carries its own unique story.

For us, creating music that we want to create and want to listen to also happens to align with what we aim to do: preserve our cultural heritage by infusing and blending it with our new contemporary senses and emotions.

Which other contemporary or independent Mongolian artists would you recommend to someone who wants to understand what is happening musically in Ulaanbaatar today?

Mongolian artists are definitely growing, evolving and diversifying alongside global musical trends.

Here are a few artists we highly recommend checking out:

• Bodikhuu
• Khusugtun
• B.L.M.D
• Magnolian
• Enji
• Even Tide
• Celine Dessberg

Finally, what is next for Dotor Khuree?

Chukana: We are really excited and looking forward to the release of our very first vinyl record for our debut LP Zarimdaa Zuils, featuring specially remastered audio.

We are also yet to organise our first solo concert.

Fuelled by this milestone, we are looking outward – driven by a passion to step onto international festival stages and bring our music to global audiences.

Dotor Khuree’s music is available on Bandcamp and other streaming platforms. The band can also be followed through its official Linktree.

By Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan English.

The post Dotor Khuree: “We want to make Mongolian music with contemporary instruments” appeared first on Novastan English.

Producer Azimjon Rahimjonov discusses Lola Animation, the making of Share Happiness, the growth of Uzbekistan’s animation sector and the studio’s ambitions to reach international audiences.

Azimjon Rahimjonov’s career in film began on the side of a road in Tashkent.

He was 19 and trying to hail a taxi early one morning when he met an experienced cinematographer named Humoyun. The encounter proved unexpectedly consequential: Humoyun took him on as an apprentice at a small studio that mainly filmed weddings, introducing him to editing and cinematography.

Rahimjonov had already been fascinated by directing from a young age, long before he knew what the profession was called. He remembers seeking out complicated films and imagining himself behind the camera. Over time, he worked across editing, cinematography and directing, learned from Uzbek filmmaker Abdukarim Mirzayev and eventually worked in television as an editing director.

His path later took him to Istanbul, where he studied at the Hassan Bin Sabit Cinema Academy. After returning to Tashkent, he joined Najot Ta’lim at a moment when its founder, Temurbek Adhamov, was supporting a grant programme for young people interested in animation.

Adhamov told him something Rahimjonov still remembers: “One day, you will become the person who guides the young people who create this animation.”

“That was how I entered the world of animation,” Rahimjonov tells Novastan Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine.

What drew him increasingly towards the medium was its potential influence on children.

“I believe that animated films created for children can have a profound influence on their worldview and upbringing.”

A sentence on a building in Tashkent

The idea for Lola Animation’s short film Share Happiness emerged from another apparently ordinary encounter in the Uzbek capital.

Several years ago, shortly after returning from Türkiye, Rahimjonov was taking one of his regular long walks through central Tashkent. On one of the city’s most expensive streets, he noticed a luxury building under construction carrying the slogan “Share Happiness.”

Standing beside it was a bearded man who appeared to be homeless.

“He was looking at the building with admiration,” Rahimjonov recalls. “There was something childlike and sincere in his expression. It felt as though he, too, wanted to enter that house and live there.”

The image stayed with him.

When his team later decided to make a short animated film as a way of building practical experience, Rahimjonov returned to the idea. The first version of the story followed a girl and an older man who secretly entered a luxurious home and pretended to be its owners. As the project developed, the setting shifted from a house to an amusement park.

The broader context also influenced the screenplay. With wars and conflicts intensifying internationally, Rahimjonov found himself thinking increasingly about children whose circumstances deny them experiences that others take for granted.

The result was an eight-minute film about a homeless girl who dreams of entering an amusement park and the security guard whose encounter with her recalls his own childhood.

“The central idea behind Share Happiness is that no child should ever feel like an outsider,” he says. “Regardless of where they live in the world, every child deserves to be happy and to experience a full and meaningful childhood.”

The film explores childhood dreams, inequality and the tension between rules and conscience. Its title, Rahimjonov says, ultimately expresses a simple idea: happiness acquires meaning when it can be shared.

Making the same film twice

The finished film hides how difficult its production was.

Rahimjonov says, quite literally, that the team made Share Happiness twice.

The first production brought together roughly 20 to 25 young people who had completed an animation grant programme. Many were still learning the fundamentals of professional modelling, animation and rendering. Shuhrat Asayev worked as the project’s art director, alongside artists including Elyor Rahmatullayev and Shohsanam Quryozova, layout artist Muhammadyusuf Yo‘ldashev and lead animator Ilhom Karimov.

“We hardly knew how to do anything at a professional level,” Rahimjonov recalls.

But that inexperienced group became the basis of what would develop into Lola Animation’s creative team. Rahmatullayev, for example, is now the studio’s art director.

The first render alone took eight months to arrive.

“When we finally saw it, we were so excited that some of us actually cried,” Rahimjonov says. “We were saying, ‘Are we really making something this amazing?’”

Production continued for around a year and a half. Yet when the rendering process was finally finished, Rahimjonov looked back at what the team had made and concluded that it was no longer good enough.

By then, the animators themselves had improved dramatically. The directing, visual style and technical quality that had once seemed exciting now appeared inadequate beside what the team had learned to produce.

So they discarded the entire eight-minute film.

Rather than patching individual sequences, the team started again from scratch.

It was an expensive decision in time and effort, but for Rahimjonov it also demonstrated how quickly the studio had developed. The final Share Happiness became not simply a film but a record of a team teaching itself how to make professional animation.

Uzbek creators, universal story

Despite being produced in Uzbekistan, Share Happiness was deliberately not designed as an explicitly Uzbek story.

Rahimjonov says the decision was intentional.

“I wanted it to be understandable and relatable to audiences around the world,” he explains. “Whether the viewer is American, Parisian, Russian, African or Uzbek, Muslim or non-Muslim, I wanted everyone to be able to find a feeling or idea that resonates with them.”

Rather than foregrounding traditional motifs or identifiable elements of everyday Uzbek life, the team chose to concentrate on childhood, inequality and compassion.

“I believe that human values transcend national and geographical boundaries,” he says.

For Rahimjonov, however, universality does not mean detachment from Uzbekistan. It reflects his ambition to create from Uzbekistan while participating in conversations that are global rather than geographically confined.

“In a way, the film also reflects my personal perspective as an artist on today’s capitalist world.”

Building an “Uzbek Animation Factory”

Lola Animation describes itself as the “Uzbek Animation Factory.”

The phrase captures the scale of its ambitions. Rahimjonov does not see the studio’s mission simply as producing individual cartoons, but as helping create an animation ecosystem capable of developing talent, telling local stories and competing internationally.

“Our goal is to contribute to building a future where human values come first by creating animated films that are engaging, thought-provoking and promote humanity,” he says.

One of his ambitions is to make Uzbekistan’s own stories more visible internationally.

“There are many stories, struggles, challenges and beautiful values that exist in Uzbekistan,” he says. “I want to bring them to the world through animation.”

At the same time, he resists the idea that Uzbek animation must be culturally self-contained. His aspiration is to connect local experience with themes that viewers elsewhere can recognise.

“I do not see our mission simply as ‘creating Uzbek animation’. To me, it is about connecting the stories, struggles, values and challenges of people in Uzbekistan with universal issues and encouraging audiences around the world to think about them on a global scale.”

That ambition has already produced projects substantially larger than Share Happiness.

Rahimjonov points to Sehrlandiya: A Heroic Mission, developed as a full-length 3D animated film. Work on an early pilot began while Share Happiness was still in production, allowing the same team to apply rapidly developing skills to a more ambitious format.

For Lola Animation, the project became evidence that an Uzbek studio could attempt work on a scale that had previously been unusual in the regional animation industry.

A broken link between generations?

Uzbekistan is not starting from zero.

The country has a long history of animation, but Rahimjonov believes the relationship between earlier generations of artists and those entering the industry today has become fragmented.

Technologically, he says, the two periods are difficult to compare. Digital tools have transformed almost every stage of production, while contemporary animators have access to possibilities that their predecessors could scarcely have imagined.

But technology is not the same as artistic inheritance.

“I feel that, to some extent, the exchange of experience and creative heritage between generations has been interrupted,” Rahimjonov says. “This is not limited to animation; it applies to the arts as a whole.”

The skills, creative approaches and accumulated experience of older Uzbek artists, he believes, were not always successfully transferred to those who followed them.

That makes the current period particularly important. Rahimjonov points to initiatives by the Center for the Development of Children’s Content, the Cinematography Agency and other parts of Uzbekistan’s film sector as potential opportunities to reconnect domestic production with larger international markets.

His ambition is not simply to create technically impressive work, but films capable of surviving beyond the moment in which they were made.

“Just like the masters who came before us, we want to create works that retain their value for many years to come.”

An industry growing quickly

Rahimjonov describes Uzbekistan’s animation sector today as expanding rapidly.

More young people are learning the technical skills required for animation, while private studios and grant programmes are creating opportunities to turn ideas into completed projects.

According to Rahimjonov, where Uzbekistan once had only around three active animation studios, the number is now approaching 15. He also sees the expansion of the country’s IT sector as an important source of skills and infrastructure for animation.

But production remains expensive.

Technically ambitious animation requires significant investment long before audiences see a finished product, and Rahimjonov says finding investors willing to finance complex short films or long-form projects remains difficult.

That is why he repeatedly credits the support of Najot Ta’lim founder Temurbek Adhamov, whose backing helped provide the conditions in which the team behind Share Happiness could learn through experimentation.

The investment was not only in a film. It was also in people who, at the beginning, were still discovering how to build one.

Taking Share Happiness abroad

International festivals now provide Lola Animation with an opportunity to test whether Rahimjonov’s belief in universal storytelling works beyond Uzbekistan.

Share Happiness premiered at the KINOdiseea International Children Film Festival and has also participated in the Black Star International Film Festival and the CMS Lucknow International Children’s Film Festival. It was also screened at the Merveilleux & Imaginaire Film Festival in Paris in September 2026, under the support of the French national committee for UNESCO and with the leadership of Bénédicte Beaugeois.

For Rahimjonov, appearing at a festival in Paris is itself the fulfilment of one of the ambitions that accompanied the film from its earliest stages.

“When we were making the film, we wanted our idea as Uzbek creators to reach the international stage and for audiences and children around the world to see our film,” he says.

Read more on Novastan: Central Asia through the lens of… Kamila Rustambekova

What matters most to him is whether audiences understand the idea at its centre.

“If audiences understand and feel the message we are trying to convey – that every child in the world deserves to be happy – then we will have achieved our goal.”

The film may have been made by an Uzbek team, but the questions it raises – childhood, inequality, dreams, compassion and the invisible barriers created by society – are deliberately broader.

“We live in a world shaped by harsh rules and complicated realities,” Rahimjonov says. “Even so, I believe that humanity and our most beautiful values remain among the most important things we have.”

What comes next

Lola Animation is already working on its next major project.

Yo‘lbars is an animated series centred on road safety, produced by Lola Animation on behalf of Uzbekistan’s Center for the Development of Children’s Content.

Rahimjonov says the underlying motivation is straightforward: preventing children and families from losing their lives in road accidents.

The project includes around 70 characters and, according to Rahimjonov, combines an ambitious visual style with a more complex production and storytelling structure than many of the studio’s earlier projects.

The intention is again international.

“We want children around the world to enjoy watching the series while also becoming more aware of road safety,” he says.

Beyond Yo‘lbars, Lola Animation wants to produce multi-episode series and feature-length animated films across different genres and visual styles. Rahimjonov also wants the studio to expand its grant programmes and share the experience it has accumulated with other emerging Uzbek animation studios.

And after deliberately making Share Happiness culturally universal, he says future feature films may move more explicitly towards Uzbekistan.

“We want to explore authentic Uzbek characters, stories and settings in greater depth and introduce them to audiences around the world.”

For a studio that began with a group of young animators waiting eight months to see their first render, that ambition is considerable.

But Rahimjonov’s own route into the industry was hardly conventional either: from a chance meeting while waiting for a taxi to editing wedding videos, film school in Istanbul and eventually building animated worlds in Tashkent.

The next challenge is to see how far those worlds can travel.

By Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan English.

The post Share Happiness, build an industry: Lola Animation’s Uzbek animation story appeared first on Novastan English.

In the very center of Almaty, a short walk from two epicenters of Kazakhstan’s theatrical scene, the Abay Kazakh State Opera and Ballet Theater and the Mikhail Lermontov State Russian Academic Theater, stands the State Academic Uyghur Theater of Musical Comedy, the first and only professional Uyghur theater in the world.

Inside the theater, a modest café named Ghérip-Senem serves tea and snacks to audiences between performances. Its name recalls one of the institution’s most iconic productions: the Uyghur opera adaptation of Ghérip-Senem, which has been part of the theater’s repertoire since the Stalinist period and is still performed regularly today.

Ghérip-Senem is not only a theatrical classic and a musical romance but also a transregional poetic reference shared across Central Eurasia. The heart-wrenching love story at its center belongs to a widespread Persianate, Islamicate, and Turkic dastan (tale) tradition whose vernacular variants had circulated across the Caucasus and Central Asia long before its modern Uyghur adaptations first appeared on stage.

The epic cycle to which Ghérip-Senem belongs developed through the interaction of oral performance, manuscript transmission, printed editions, and later theatrical, operatic, and cinematic adaptations. Across its various vernacular forms, the story follows the structure of a Persianate romance: two lovers are bound by destiny or promise, separated by social rank, parental or aristocratic opposition, rival suitors, exile, false accusations, and extended periods of separation (hijran/juda), before fidelity is vindicated through return and reunion. Its persistence across various linguistic and literary traditions points to a shared poetic repository in which oral narrations, lyrical verses, moral testing, and the symbolism of Persianate love poetry could be repeatedly vernacularized without compromising the recognizable narrative structure or figurative repertoire.

Notable variants and their Soviet revivals

Some of the best-known variants of this epic cycle developed across the Caucasus – Central Asia divide, especially among Turkmen and Azerbaijani communities.

The Turkmen variant, Şasenem-Garyp, represents one of the most prominent vernacular forms of the story. Centered on the same cast of lovers, rulers, viziers, and rivals, the tale preserves the familiar structure of prenatal promise, broken covenant, separation, exile, imposed marriage, and eventual reunion. Its continued prominence in Turkmen literary and theatrical life also prepared the ground for later operatic and cinematic adaptations.

The Turkmen branch received one of its major Soviet rebirths in the 1963 film Şasenem-Garyp (Shakhsenem i Garib), based on literary adaptations of the dastan published in the 1940s. The film drew on the dastan’s natural affinity with musical melodrama: prose narration supplies the sequence of events, while singing, accompanied by the dutar (a traditional two-stringed instrument), gives voice to longing, suffering, and reunion. The film adaptation also translated the tale’s lyrical inheritance into visual form through costume, bazaar scenes, decorative settings, and the rose-and-nightingale (gül we bilbil) imagery, a recurrent trope in the poetry of the early modern Turkmen poet Magtymguly Pyragy.

The Azeri variant, Ashyg-Garib (Aşıq-Qərib), developed around the figure of the wandering ashyg (minstrel), whose love, exile, and return are inseparable from singing. In this version, the protagonist’s identity is shaped by the saz: lyrical poetry becomes the medium through which he declares longing, gains recognition, and demonstrates his fidelity. The tale retains the familiar narrative pattern but endows it with a distinctly Azeri musicality through the figure of Garib as a troubadour-lover. Its recurrent geographic references also place the story in a South Caucasian setting, with Tabriz and Tiflis forming the principal loci of origin, dream, encounter, and desire.

The same Azeri branch entered Russian and Soviet artistic circulation through Mikhail Lermontov’s literary retelling, Ashik Kerib, and later through Sergey Parajanov’s 1988 film under the same title. Lermontov compressed the dastan into a novella, while Parajanov’s film, based on Lermontov’s retelling, presented the story in a richly stylized Caucasian setting, combining ashyg/ashugh music, Azeri lyrics, elaborate ornament, pomegranate imagery, and ritualized gestures.

Ghérip-Senem in Uyghur adaptations

By the early twentieth century, the same epic cycle had become widespread among Uyghurs, particularly in the Ili Valley, where the Taranchis, a subgroup of Uyghurs, had sustained intensive cultural contact with Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and Tatars for centuries. The love story entered modern Uyghur literary and theatrical form in the 1930s. The renowned Uyghur writer Ziya Semed (Samadi), himself a native of the Ili Valley, produced an operatic adaptation of Ghérip-Senem in 1937. Another adaptation by Zunun Qadiri, also completed in 1937, later formed the basis for the 1981 film Ghérip-Senem, produced by the Ürümchi-based Tien-Shan Film Studio (Tengritagh kino studiisi), which would become a modern Uyghur cultural icon.

The 1981 film opens with recollections of two parallel hunting expeditions by Shah Abbas and his vizier Hesen, during which they each encounter a pregnant gazelle and spare it after recalling that their wives are also expecting children concurrently. Abbas then pledges that, if one household has a son and the other a daughter, the two children will be joined in marriage. Abbas’s wife gives birth to Senem, while Hesen’s wife gives birth to Ghérip. Years later, the two study together in a madrasa, where companionship eventually transforms into love. Their promised union is disrupted by Shawaz, who plots the assassination of Hesen, subsequently succeeds him as vizier, and seeks to make his son, Abdulla, heir to the throne by marrying him to Senem. Through conspiracy and false accusations, Shawaz turns Abbas against Ghérip, who is condemned as a rebel and expelled alongside his family. In exile, Ghérip’s fidelity moves Dilarem, a female serder (ruler), whose mountain community helps him return. Shawaz and Abdulla’s conspiracy is eventually exposed, Abbas recognizes the injustice committed against Hesen’s family, and the lovers are reunited in matrimony after lengthy separation.

Persianate poetic tropes on the silver screen

The 1981 film draws extensively upon the repertoire of Persianate poetic symbolism and reproduces those literary tropes through visual imagery, songs, and dialogue.

The names of the main characters represent some of the clearest uses of poetic symbolism. The name Ghérip recalls the Perso-Arabic word gharib, meaning a stranger, exile, or wanderer. Senem derives from Persian sanam, meaning an idealized image or beloved, a word whose secular poetic use often intersects with Sufi-inflected language of beauty, devotion, and forbidden adoration. The ruler’s designation as Shah Abbas likewise places the court within Persianate political traditions. These names give the story an implied register of estrangement and devotion from the outset.

The film’s most explicit literary frame is Perhat-Shérin (Farhad and Shirin), a love story popularized by Nizami Ganjavi in Persian and later elaborated by Alisher Navoiy in Chaghatay. Senem’s reading of the story in Charbagh (“quadripartite garden”) leads to a scene she fantasizes, where Perhat and Shérin appear in the likeness of Ghérip and Senem. In Senem’s vision, Perhat splits the mountain with his pickaxe, which turns the classic metaphor of impossible labor into a visual prefiguration of Ghérip’s own ordeal. When the lovers later invoke Perhat-Shérin and Leyli-Mejnun in their vows, they place their bond within a poetic lineage of trials and tribulations, separation, longing, and self-consuming devotion, motifs that also acquired strong Sufi resonance in other Persianate texts.

The triangular structure of the romance recalls the rivalry embedded in the literary trope of Khosrow, Shirin, and Farhad, where the beloved becomes the object of competing claims between devoted labor and the desire of the powerful. In the film, Abdulla’s desire for Senem is coercive and jealous rather than devotional or genuine, reinforced by his father Shawaz’s political ambitions and by Abdulla’s own penchant for weapons and violence. Against Ghérip’s patience, exile, and fidelity, Abdulla represents a rival love emptied of adab (etiquette, decency, and refinement) and transformed into an instrument of power struggles.

The pregnant gazelle at the beginning of the film symbolizes vulnerability, maternity, and compassion. As Shah Abbas and Hesen spare the animal while recalling their own pregnant wives, the scene transforms a hunting expedition into a moral test of compassion. In Persianate love stories, especially in Nizami’s Sufi-inflected narrative arc of Leyla and Majnun, wild animals often congregate near the suffering lover as creatures, protected by his mercy, as his love and compassion extend even to animals.

The symbolism of violence takes a darker turn in the film. The arrow – the weapon initially restrained before the pregnant gazelle – returns in corrupted form when Hesen is murdered by a poisoned arrow. Meanwhile, explicit accusations of slander and calumny throughout the film are expressed through the word zeher (“poison”). Persianate ethical literature, from Sa‘di’s Gulistan to later Turkic didactic verses in The Book of Dede Korkut, often treats slander as a moral injury. The film connects emotional damage to literal poison.

The royal garden, Charbagh, functions as the film’s central site of love and confinement. The term itself evokes the quadripartite garden associated with Persianate ideas of nourishment and paradise, while the scene of Senem reading Perhat-Shérin by an aywan (veranda) situates poetry and imagination in a setting for genuine love. As Abbas later turns the same space into a place of confinement for Senem, the garden’s meaning changes from emotional awakening to the enclosure of the beloved under patriarchal and autocratic authority.

The recurrent pair-of-roses imagery functions as the film’s most intimate visual emblem. Senem sews Ghérip a handkerchief bearing her name and two roses. Later, at the wedding festivities arranged for her and Abdulla, she recognizes Ghérip’s nearby presence through a bouquet with two roses at its center, sent to her by an intermediary. The rose, already central to Persianate poetry, becomes both an image of beauty and a code of recognition in the film. Furthermore, the handkerchief further condenses innocence and sorrow. Its white color and silky fabric evoke purity and tenderness, while its very function as an object for wiping tears turns it into a keepsake of separation.

The madrasa scenes place Ghérip and Senem’s love within the discipline of adab. The mullah, Jamalidin, whose name means “beauty of faith,” is the source of knowledge and etiquette. The subject taught by Jamalidin, whom his pupils address reverently as ustaz (“master”), appears to be edebiyet (“literature” – the word itself a derivative of adab). Abbas’s removal of Senem from the madrasa, followed by Jamalidin’s imprisonment, therefore marks the rupture of the ethical and literary order that first allowed their love to flourish. Even Shah Abbas, despite his despotic tendencies, defers to Jamalidin’s moral authority. Jamalidin’s eventual release from imprisonment also marks the return of reason and justice.

Some of the songs in the film also draw upon the Persianate vocabulary of longing. As Ghérip waits for Senem in Charbagh, his drawn-out cry of “yarim kelmidi” (“my beloved has not come”) turns the Persianate term yar (“beloved”) into an expression of anxiety and separation. Senem’s later declaration that her heart burns for Ghérip echoes a classical lyrical motif found in Rumi’s ghazals and Nadira’s love poems, where the burning heart, often expressed through the imagery of a kebab, highlights suffering, fidelity, and spiritual cleansing. In Sufi-inflected poetry, burning may also suggest purification through longing.

The repeated appearance of a zulfiqar (a bifurcated sword) in the film marks the continuity between Hesen’s moral authority and Ghérip’s eventual vindication. In Islamic traditions, the zulfiqar is associated with the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, and evokes valor, justice, and martial authority. Because the sword has once belonged to Hesen and is later passed reverently to Ghérip before his return, it functions as a restored inheritance: Ghérip receives the symbol of justice that has been interrupted by Hesen’s murder and Shawaz’s usurpation.

Shah Abbas’s authority over marriage, confinement, exile, and execution gives the story a coercive dimension. His order to execute Ghérip is interrupted by Eid al-Adha (Qurban Héyit), whose associations with sacrifice, mercy, and communal renewal place sacred traditions above despotic wrath.

The forty-day wedding festivities arranged for Senem and Abdulla draw on a symbolic duration widely used in Persianate literary traditions to mark trial and transformation. In the film, the number forty gives the false marriage the appearance of ritualistic completeness. The imposed forty-day celebration ends not with Senem’s surrender but with Ghérip’s return and the restoration of the original covenant.

Direct and indirect allusions to paradise appear throughout the film and beyond. Senem’s reading of Perhat-Shérin leads to a fantasy of paradise, while Charbagh and the paired roses echo Persianate associations between gardens and paradisic beauty. In a 1980 painting based on the same story by the prominent Uyghur painter Ghazi Emet, the inclusion of two peacocks, a familiar emblem of splendor and paradise in Persianate visual culture, extends this imagery into courtly aesthetics, while its folded tail suggests the still-unrealized potential of earthly love.

The film’s Persianate poetic symbolism is presented through distinctly Uyghur cultural elements. Its dialogue and songs are based on highly poeticized Uyghur diction and syntax, while the film’s visual texture includes etles köynek (traditional silk dress), doppa (traditional skullcap), qapaq (a gourd turned into a water bottle), kerney (a long horn typically used in festivities), and chin ussuli (a traditional dance involving the balancing of numerous bowls on the dancer’s head). These elements give the love story a specifically Uyghur form and allow the broader Persianate poetic symbolism to be conveyed through Uyghur music, costume, and material culture.

Shérinjan: A Soviet musical afterlife

A revealing parallel appears in the 1986 Soviet Uyghur musical Séhirlik Alma (The Magical Apple), filmed in Bukhara and Khiva with songs performed by the Uyghur pop band Yashliq (“youth”) in honor of the band’s home city, Almaty, whose name means “where apples are from.” Although the sequence of love stories unfolds in a stylized pre-modern setting, one line of dialogue explicitly refers to the State Uyghur Dance Ensemble of the Kazakh SSR, an anachronism that marks the film as a playful Soviet Uyghur reworking of Persianate fairy-tale romance rather than a rigorous historical reenactment. Like the literary symbolism in Ghérip-Senem, the musical stages love through pop songs, lavish costumes, traditional and techno dances, garden imagery, and the symbolism of apples and roses.

A song in the musical, “Shérinjan,” offers the clearest example of this parallel poetic vocabulary. The song is a confession of love from a young man to his beloved. The beloved’s name evokes the poetic heroine, Shérin, while the affectionate suffix jan (a Persian-derived endearment that also means “soul” and “life”) draws on a Persianate language of intimacy in which the beloved is also the soul and life. Its lyrical images unfold through a familiar poetic sequence: apples thrown into the river drift without sinking, with the word for drifting, leylimeq, also evoking the poetic heroine, Leyli; the fire of love blazes without going out; gardens stir in the breeze; flowers summon the nightingale; and thirsty hearts cry yar-yar day and night. The singer’s refusal to enter the beloved’s garden or to pluck her pomegranate adds a note of restraint, turning desire into an ethical posture governed by adab. The song thereby reproduces many of the same symbolic associations that structure Ghérip-Senem: love moves through flowers, water, fire, garden, confession, and the disciplined longing of the faithful lover.

The only non-Uyghur song in the musical is the chorus of “Million alykh roz” (“A Million Scarlet Roses”), a classic by the late Soviet pop diva Alla Pugachëva, reinterpreted by a child before a young couple. Performed with a mixture of traditional Uyghur instrumentation and 1980s electronica arrangement, the song extends the Persianate symbolism of roses in a form familiar to a broader Soviet audience and inserts a recognizable Soviet pop refrain into a pre-modern romance setting without disrupting the musical’s fairy-tale fabric. The image of a million scarlet roses transforms the traditional pair-of-roses motif, as seen in Ghérip-Senem, into an extravagant public display of devotion.

The ubiquity of Persianate poetic symbolism in Ghérip-Senem reveals the depth of Uyghur cultural heritage and its rootedness in a cultural spectrum far broader than any single local or national tradition. Through its distinct Uyghur cultural forms, the film participates in a shared Persianate repertoire of romance, refinement, longing, and moral codes that has linked communities across Central Eurasia and beyond for centuries. The film’s significance, therefore, lies not only in its iconic status within modern Uyghur culture but also in the clarity with which it affirms Uyghur inheritance of a magnificent literary patrimony.

By Diego Benning Wang.

Diego Benning Wang is a historian of Eurasia and Eastern Europe. Having received a PhD in history from Princeton University, an MA in Russian studies from Columbia University, and a BA in Russian studies from New York University, he is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University.

The post “Ghérip-Senem”: The visualization of Persianate poetic symbolism in Uyghur cinema appeared first on Novastan English.

Uzbek-born concert pianist Diana Skobina began playing at four and performed with the National Orchestra of Uzbekistan at nine. Now based in the United States, she has performed at venues including Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, the Musikverein in Vienna and Walt Disney Concert Hall. As she enters a new stage of her career, Skobina is increasingly looking back to the musical culture that shaped her – and towards ways of bringing Uzbek and Central Asian composers to wider international audiences.

This article was produced as a paid partnership with Diana Skobina.

For Diana Skobina, music began at home in Tashkent.

Her earliest memories of the piano are not of formal lessons or concert halls, but of listening to her mother play Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and composers including Georgy Mushel and Boris Gienko. She remembers sitting nearby, captivated by the sound and thinking simply: I want to be able to play that.

She began lessons at the age of four. By nine, she was performing with the National Orchestra of Uzbekistan – an experience she now sees as the moment when music ceased to be something private.

“It was the first time I understood what it actually means to be a performer – that music isn’t just something you work on alone, it’s something you give to other people,” she tells Novastan.

Yet Skobina says there was never a single moment when she consciously decided that the piano would become her life.

“It crept up on me gradually. Music became so woven into my everyday life that at some point it stopped being a decision and just became who I was.”

Today, that journey has taken her from musical institutions in Tashkent to conservatories in the United States and onto international stages. But as her career has expanded geographically, Skobina says her relationship with Uzbekistan has become more, rather than less, important to her artistic identity.

A musical education shaped in Tashkent

Skobina studied at the Uspensky School of Music in Tashkent, where she describes an environment in which musical education was taken seriously from an early age.

Her teachers Tatiana Sotnikova and Guzal Ardashirova gave her what she describes as the fundamentals of her musical education: careful listening, attention to detail, discipline and respect for the score.

“Being a musician takes discipline, patience and consistent work,” she says. “But it was never only about discipline for me. It was also where I found curiosity, discovery, real joy.”

At the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan, where she studied with Professor Elmira Mirkasimova, music gradually changed from a passion into a professional path. Mirkasimova encouraged her to go deeper into structure, phrasing, character and expression – lessons that Skobina says continue to influence her performances today.

The technical foundations of that education remain central to the way she approaches the piano.

“The biggest lesson was that technique should never exist for its own sake. It has to serve the musical idea,” she says.

She learned to pay close attention to sound, articulation, rhythm, structure and character, but also to search beneath the notes for the intention of the composer.

“A technically clean performance was never the goal in itself. Every detail has to ultimately serve communication and expression.”

When Skobina later continued her education in the United States, she encountered different musical traditions and teaching methods. But she never saw that as a reason to abandon what she had learned in Uzbekistan.

“I’ve always seen it as something to build on, not replace.”

Learning to build an artistic career in the United States

Moving to the United States required another kind of education.

Skobina says one of the biggest differences she encountered was the expectation that professional musicians must actively shape their own careers rather than concentrating exclusively on artistic development.

“Back home, my job was to become the best musician I could be,” she explains. “In the US, I learned that an artist also has to create their own opportunities – build relationships, connect with audiences, collaborate, teach, understand the practical side of the profession.”

Her studies at the Lynn University Conservatory with Dr Roberta Rust were important in that transition. Rust encouraged her to combine rigorous preparation with greater artistic individuality and to develop her own voice rather than reproduce an established formula.

The experience also pushed Skobina to become more independent professionally.

“I had to navigate a new culture and a new professional landscape while staying true to myself,” she says. “That balance – adapting and growing without losing the foundation I brought with me – still matters to me today.”

She later continued her training at the Manhattan School of Music and has now completed her postgraduate studies there, working with pianist and educator Dr Wael Farouk.

Skobina credits Farouk with encouraging her to listen more deeply to tone and colour, think more carefully about musical structure and interpretation, and approach memorisation in new ways. His influence, she adds, went beyond technique.

“What touched me just as much was his generosity and genuine care as a teacher,” she says. “He reminded me that real musicianship and real kindness go hand in hand.”

From Carnegie Hall to the Musikverein

Skobina’s career has since taken her onto stages including Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York, the Musikverein in Vienna and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

Those performances have inevitably carried symbolic weight.

“Each has its own history and atmosphere, and standing on those stages naturally makes me reflect on the journey that got me there,” she says.

Yet she is reluctant to identify one venue or performance as the moment everything changed.

Rather, her sense of possibility developed gradually – through concerts, audiences, backstage moments and the accumulated realisation of how far music had carried her from where she began.

“The prestige of the hall has never been the most important thing to me,” she says. “What matters most is the relationship between the performer, the music and the audience. Even in the most celebrated room in the world, I want to feel that I’m communicating something sincere.”

Uzbekistan remains part of the sound

That idea of communication is also closely connected to Skobina’s sense of cultural identity.

“Uzbekistan is deeply present in who I am as an artist,” she says.

Growing up in Tashkent meant hearing European classical music alongside the musical traditions of Central Asia. Skobina believes the coexistence of those musical worlds helped shape her sensitivity to melody, rhythm, colour and emotional nuance.

She compares it to language: the sounds heard during childhood can continue to influence the ear long after someone stops consciously thinking about them.

“I don’t set out to make a piece sound ‘Uzbek’, or to layer one tradition visibly onto another,” she explains. “It’s more that my background comes through naturally in how I interpret music, because it’s simply part of who I am.”

“Cultural identity doesn’t need to be added to the music artificially – it’s already there, quietly shaping how I listen and how I communicate.”

That heritage is increasingly influencing not only how Skobina performs, but also the repertoire she wants to champion.

She names Mukhtar Ashrafi, Georgy Mushel, Mutal Burkhanov, Mirkhalil Mahmudov and Rustam Abdullaev among the Uzbek composers whose work she would like to see reach larger audiences. She is also particularly interested in drawing attention to women composers from Uzbekistan.

“There’s so much wonderful music from Uzbekistan and Central Asia that international audiences simply haven’t encountered yet,” she says.

For Skobina, the objective is not to present the repertoire primarily as unfamiliar or “exotic”, but to make a case for its artistic value in its own right.

“When I play music from Uzbekistan for an international audience, it feels personal – I’m sharing something connected to my home with people who may be hearing it for the first time.”

She hopes future concerts, recordings and collaborations can place Central Asian works alongside more established classical repertoire and allow listeners to encounter them as part of a living musical tradition.

One piano, two pianists

Collaboration is another important part of Skobina’s musical life.

She performs with her husband, pianist Sergei Skobin, as the Skobin Duo, working across four-hand and piano-duo repertoire.

Playing together, she says, requires a different form of listening from solo performance.

“As a soloist, you’re responsible for the whole musical architecture yourself. In a duo, you have to build one musical organism together with another person.”

That means listening constantly – to timing, direction, sound, phrasing and the other performer’s intentions – while retaining an individual artistic voice.

Their marriage creates a degree of instinctive understanding, Skobina says, but not necessarily agreement.

“We don’t always hear things the same way, and I think that’s actually productive. Our conversations about phrasing, tempo, articulation and character often lead us somewhere neither of us would have found alone.”

Their repertoire has included Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances, the four-hand version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and music connected to their Central Asian heritage.

For Skobina, the experience has also influenced her solo playing.

“Playing chamber music has made me a better listener, and that’s made me a better solo pianist too.”

Teaching the next generation

Teaching occupies an increasingly important place alongside performance.

Skobina says the influence of her own teachers – from Tashkent to Florida and New York – has convinced her that music education is not simply about transmitting technique.

She sees traces of each stage of her own education in the way she now works with students: discipline and foundations from her early teachers in Uzbekistan, depth from her conservatory training, individuality from Lynn University and a more developed understanding of sound and structure from Manhattan.

But she does not want her students to reproduce her own path.

“Every student is different,” she says. “Some need technical guidance, some need to learn to trust themselves, some need help finding their own voice, some just need someone to believe in them.”

“I don’t want my students to become copies of me. I want them to become themselves – independent, thoughtful musicians who can listen, question and make their own artistic decisions. Most of all, I want them to love music.”

A new international chapter

Skobina has recently been welcomed as a signed artist with Global Art & Culture USA, which she sees as an opportunity to bring several strands of her career together.

She hopes the new stage will support further international performance, recordings, collaborations and projects combining artistic work with education and cultural exchange.

In particular, she wants to develop programmes introducing audiences to music from Uzbekistan and Central Asia.

“I’m especially drawn to projects where different cultures meet through music,” she says. “For me, cultural exchange only really works when it’s grounded in genuine artistic dialogue.”

It is also an opportunity to define more clearly what she wants her international artistic identity to represent: an artist whose career and education span countries and institutions, but whose musical roots remain firmly connected to Uzbekistan.

Building that career has not always been straightforward.

Skobina speaks openly about the less visible aspects of international musical life: years of preparation, applications, travel, financial pressures, uncertainty and the constant need to create opportunities.

“There are moments where you have to be patient with yourself and keep moving even when the path isn’t clear,” she says.

But the reward remains essentially the same as it was when she first sat at the piano.

“There’s something incredibly special about sitting down at the piano and feeling, for a moment, that the audience and I are sharing the same emotional space.”

“And I feel especially fortunate that music has let me stay connected to Uzbekistan while building my life here in the US.”

Bringing Central Asian repertoire onto the international stage

With her postgraduate studies now completed, Skobina wants the coming years to bring more performance, recording, teaching and collaboration.

She plans to continue expanding her solo repertoire while developing the Skobin Duo and other chamber projects.

One of her clearest ambitions is to create programmes and recordings that place familiar works from the European classical repertoire alongside lesser-known music by Uzbek and Central Asian composers.

For Skobina, the point is not to separate the two traditions but to allow audiences to hear them in conversation.

“I’m also drawn to collaborations with musicians from different backgrounds and projects that combine performance, education and cultural exchange,” she says.

Her goal is an international career that continues to expand without weakening the link to where it began.

“I began this journey as a little girl in Tashkent, and I feel fortunate that the piano has taken me to so many places and introduced me to so many wonderful people.”

“I don’t know exactly where the next chapter leads, but I know I want to keep learning, performing, sharing music, and representing my culture with warmth and pride.”

For Skobina, the idea ultimately returns to the same principle that first drew her to performance as a child: music as something shared.

“Music has always been about connection for me,” she says. “It connects me to my childhood in Tashkent, to the traditions I was raised in, to the life and education I built in the US, and to audiences and musicians from many different cultures.”

“That’s what I hope to keep doing through my career – using music to connect people, while carrying forward the culture and heritage that shaped who I am.”

By Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan English.

The post From Tashkent to the international stage: Diana Skobina brings Uzbek music to new audiences appeared first on Novastan English.

In September 2026, Princeton University returned to life after the summer recess, with students back on its Collegiate Gothic campus and the Princeton Triangle Club holding auditions for its latest annual musical. Exactly a century earlier, the same student troupe opened Samarkand, a lavish romantic comic opera named after the Central Asian city, before a paying audience in nearby Trenton, New Jersey.

No footage of the production is known to survive, and its undergraduate performers have long since passed from living memory. But the centenary of this forgotten play offers a revealing glimpse into the American collegiate imagination of Central Asia in the 1920s, when Samarkand could serve as shorthand for a sumptuous, composite Islamicate Orient rather than for anything particularly specific to the city or the region.

Princeton’s Samarkand

Princeton’s century-old student-run Triangle Club provided the institutional setting where an Orientalist imagination of Central Asia could become the subject of a polished Ivy League theatrical production. Founded in 1891, the Club is the oldest touring collegiate musical-comedy troupe in the United States, having built its reputation by staging an original show each academic year and taking it beyond Princeton. Undergraduate students write and perform each production, while professional directors and choreographers prepare it for public performance. Samarkand, billed for the 1926-27 academic year, was the Club’s 38th annual comic opera production and was staged four years before the opening of McCarter Theatre, where the annual tradition has since been anchored.

    True to the Club’s traditions, Samarkand was a product of undergraduate authorship and performance combined with professional theatrical supervision, and its premiere brought Princeton’s Orientalist fantasy before a paying public in the Garden State’s capital. On December 15, 1926, the production opened at the Trent Theatre in Trenton, a public commercial venue twelve miles (nineteen kilometers) from Princeton. In operation from 1903 to 1972, the Trent Theatre predated McCarter and served as a temporary stage after the destruction of the on-campus Casino Theatre briefly left Princeton University without a suitable theatrical venue.

Undergraduates wrote the libretto, lyrics, music, and dialogue and filled every credited role in the cast and chorus. Because Princeton admitted only men until the 1969-1970 academic year, male students also performed the female characters. Donald Clive Stuart, a professor of dramatic literature at Princeton, directed the show, while other theatrical professionals staged its dances and arranged and orchestrated its score (no playwright or script adviser was credited).

    Samarkand presents a rather conventional comic-operatic mixture of prophecy, romance, court intrigue, and sudden acquisition of power. Act I opens in the throne room of Haroun-El-Emenope, Caliph of Ashkabad, whose court includes his daughter Shelmardeen, the magician Attar-Bey-Bey, and the ambitious wazir Raschid. A voice from a feared magic urn foretells Haroun’s death and Shelmardeen’s marriage to a vagabond. Zahirudin, a mysterious adventurer from Samarkand whose name is said to mean “Fate,” arrives in search of the renowned princess, courts her with songs about the Golden Road to his native city, and eventually departs with her.

Raschid plots the Caliph’s death, seeks Shelmardeen for himself, and directs jealousy and suspicion against Zahirudin. A dancing girl named Yasmini, two rival suitors, four conspirators, and the Djinn of the urn complete the principal cast. Act II takes place in an enchanted garden, where the prophecy is fulfilled through a convenient reversal: death claims the cruel Caliph of Samarkand instead of Haroun, after which Zahirudin is proclaimed Caliph and marries Shelmardeen.

An Orientalist Fantasy of Central Asia

    The surviving visual materials for Samarkand presented Central Asia through generalized Orientalist imagery of luxury, mystery, and theatrical exoticism. The play’s black-and-gold playbill cover features an enthroned, elaborately dressed figure before an immense peacock tail, with dense ornament covering nearly every part of the design. The play’s orange-and-black sheet-music cover presents a turbaned man and a richly costumed woman beneath a drooping tree as the man points toward a distant city of domes and minarets under a crescent moon. The program’s costume drawing of Attar-Bey-Bey depicts the court magician in a long robe, broad sash, extravagant jewelry, and elaborate headdress against a dark flame-shaped backdrop. None of these elements is distinctly Central Asian.

The most candid commentary on this imagery appears in a garment advertisement beneath the program’s setting descriptions. A cartoon turbaned figure dreams of a modern outfit while the caption declares, “All this Oriental splendor stuff reminds us we’ve some pretty splendid male wardrobings for Americans. At least Princeton undergrads and alumni tell us so.” The joke makes explicit what the covers and costume imply: the play’s Samarkand was a marketable image of “Oriental splendor,” and the advertisement addressed its theatergoers directly as American consumers, particularly Princeton students and alumni.

Samarkand on Tour

    Samarkand took Princeton’s Orientalist fantasy on a national tour that eventually encompassed twenty-four performances, and reviewers across its itinerary consistently valued the production’s humor, spectacle, and theatrical polish. After three performances in Trenton on December 15-17, 1926, the Club appeared in Washington (December 18), Baltimore (December 20), New York’s Metropolitan Opera House (December 21), Pittsburgh (December 22), Cincinnati (December 23), Nashville (December 24), and Birmingham (December 25). After a one-day interval on the day after Christmas, the tour resumed in Memphis (December 27), followed by Little Rock (December 28), St. Louis (December 29), Chicago (December 30), Indianapolis (December 31), Cleveland (January 1, 1927), Syracuse (January 3), and New York again (January 4). The Club later performed in Orange, New Jersey (February 18), Newark (February 21), and Philadelphia (February 25-26). On June 17-18, shortly after the end of the spring semester, the play was staged one last time at Princeton’s University Gymnasium (destroyed in a fire in 1944).

All twenty-four known performances occurred during the 1926-27 academic year, and no evidence has emerged of a later revival. After opening night, The Daily Princetonian declared that Samarkand “took its place among the best of recent Triangle Club plays,” although it observed some roughness in the most demanding dances. The New York Times called the Metropolitan Opera House performance “a hit” and praised its songs, jokes, dancing, costumes, and settings. Newspapers in Nashville, Birmingham, St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, Syracuse, and other stops repeatedly commended the catchy music, clever lines, scenic effects, colorful costumes, disciplined chorus, and professional finish. The surviving notices offered little discussion of the play’s geographic or cultural accuracy.

A City Reduced to a Dream

    In Samarkand, the city honored in its title serves primarily as a geographically and culturally distant realm whose name promises romance, wealth, happiness, and power. The program identifies the setting of Act II only as “an enchanted garden in Samarkand,” and the city receives none of the social or physical detail of an actual urban setting. In a musical sequence titled “The Pilgrimage,” the Spirit of the Urn commands the characters to travel eastward over the sand, past swaying caravans and through low shadows, along a golden road where their “fondest dreams ever come true.”

Zahirudin similarly describes the place as a “dim-mooned city of delight,” and the ballet libretto calls the Golden Road to Samarkand “the pathway that leads to the land where dreams come true.” Samarkand offers rewards at every level of the plot: the journey promises riches, joy, and power; it secures the lovers’ union; and it raises the vagabond Zahirudin to the caliphate. No streets, monuments, institutions, or ordinary inhabitants appear, as the city is reduced to sand, caravans, bells, magic, an enchanted garden, and a distant promise of fulfillment.

A Composite Orient

    The cultural setting of Samarkand is a composite Orientalist fantasy that blends Arabic, Persianate, Turkic, Central Asian, and South Asian references while offering almost nothing specific to Samarkand or Central Asian history and culture. Its Arabic materials include a caliph and wazir, a Djinn from a magic urn, and the song “We Know All About the Arabian Nights (But What About the Days?).” The cast bears Arabic- and Persianate-adjacent names, while “Come to Our Altar Fires” and the “Hymn of the Fire-Worshippers” connect it to Zoroastrianism. Samarkand and “Ashkabad” are the principal regional markers, accompanied by generic palaces, deserts, and caravans; historically or geographically specific Central Asian features are virtually absent.

The suitor Haidan Sikh even introduces a South Asian religious identity into the mixture, primarily to facilitate an English pun. The religious setting is equally unstable: subjects of a caliph chant to idols, burn incense, seek prophecy from an urn, and sing to altar fires. Even the name Ashkabad presents a chronological puzzle. The city now known as Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, officially bore the name Poltoratsk from 1919 to 1927. The coincidence was presumably inadvertent.

Inventing the East in English

    The pseudo-Islamicate names in Samarkand reveal a genuinely amusing side of the production’s Orientalism, as their foreign-sounding forms seem designed to deliver jokes in English. The rival suitors Peke Abou and Haidan Sikh are phonetic disguises for “peekaboo” and “hide-and-seek.” Haroun-El-Emenope can be heard as “around L-M-N-O-P” (an alphabetical sequence), while Attar-Bey-Bey appears to echo “attababy.” The adventurer Zahirudin seems to suggest “They hear you, Dean,” echoing the name of his eventual bride, Shelmardeen – “She’ll marry Dean.” Four conspirators named Iambad, Heezbad, Urbad, and Wirbad identify themselves as “I am bad,” “He’s bad,” “You’re bad,” and “We’re bad.” Although these puns demonstrate undergraduate ingenuity, their mechanism treats Islamicate names as decorative sounds detached from cultural context.

Before Princeton: Imagining Central Asia in the West

    The composite setting of Samarkand may be seen as part of a longer Western tradition that located Central Asia within a loosely bounded Persianate and Islamicate Orient. Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721) used the wealthy Isfahani nobleman Usbek, his seraglio, and a passing allusion to the khan of Tartary as materials for a French satire of European society. Goethe’s engagement with Hafez, Ferdowsi, and Zoroastrian texts informed his own experiments in Persianate poetry and contributed to his later conception of world literature (Weltliteratur). Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) subsequently made a stylized Persian past extraordinarily popular among the English-speaking public.

More geographically explicit representations followed the routes of Arminius Vámbéry, Pyotr Semyonov-Tyan-Shanskiy, Nikolay Przhevalskiy, Sven Hedin, and Mannerheim, whose journeys across Central Asia generated travel narratives, maps, ethnographic collections, and photographs under scientific, imperial, and military auspices. Stephen Graham’s illustrated Through Russian Central Asia (1916) carried this tradition into English travel writing only a decade before Samarkand. The Russian painter Vasiliy Vereshchagin’s Turkestan Series juxtaposed bazaars, monuments, and local figures with conquest and death, while the Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky’s early color photography presented Central Asian cities, architecture, rulers, and inhabitants with striking immediacy. Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot, which premiered in Milan less than eight months before Samarkand, offered a contemporaneous example of cultural conflation: its Persian-derived title means “daughter of Turan,” although its title character is a Chinese princess and the opera is set in imperial China and incorporates Chinese folk melodies.

Tamerlane and the Western Imagination

    Western fascination with Tamerlane (Timur) had endowed Samarkand with much of its dramatic reputation long before 1926, although the Princeton play omitted the conqueror who had made the city his imperial capital. Christopher Marlowe’s two-part Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587-1588) presented Timur as a Scythian shepherd whose military genius and boundless ambition carried him to dominion over vast territories. Around 1700, Andrea Celesti’s monumental Tamerlane and Bajazet portrayed the victorious ruler receiving the captive Ottoman sultan amid an invented display of Oriental magnificence. Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane (1701) offered a contrasting image of a restrained and virtuous monarch, commonly interpreted as an analog for William III, while Bajazet represented Louis XIV.

The defeat and captivity of Bayezid subsequently provided the shared historical premise for George Frideric Handel’s Tamerlano (1724), Antonio Vivaldi’s Bajazet (1735), and Josef Mysliveček’s Il gran Tamerlano (1771), all of which combined imperial conflict with captivity, dynastic romance, and suicide. Across the Atlantic Ocean, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tamerlane” (1827) imagined the dying conqueror lamenting that his pursuit of power had cost him his youthful love. These works assigned Tamerlane radically different roles – insatiable conqueror, enlightened sovereign, sadistic tyrant, or tragic lover – and repeatedly used him to examine ambition, kingship, political rivalry, and unfulfilled love. By 1926, the name Samarkand therefore carried centuries of associations with imperial power, danger, magnificence, and romance, even though Samarkand detached those associations from Timur and his empire.

From Bukhara Carpets to the Golden Road

    The city of Bukhara appeared frequently in Western commercial accounts, as the city’s name became shorthand for Oriental luxury in the carpet trade. By the turn of the twentieth century, so-called “Bokhara rugs” had become fashionable furnishings in Paris, London, and other European and North American markets. Travel narratives reinforced the city’s reputation as a remote seat of Islamic tradition and monarchical wealth, and Prokudin-Gorsky’s 1911 color portrait of Emir Alim Khan, the last emir of the Emirate of Bukhara, preserved an especially vivid image of its royal splendor. The use of “Bokhara” in Western commerce closely parallels Princeton’s theatrical use of Samarkand: both place-names promised magnificence while conveying little about the cities and peoples they denoted.

    By 1926, Samarkand had become a familiar Western literary emblem of sensual abundance, imperial grandeur, distant suffering, and alluring travel. John Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes (1820) invokes “silken Samarcand” amid a feast of candied fruits, spiced delicacies, gold, silver, and perfume whose imagined geography extends from Fez to Lebanon (with Samarkand nearly 2,000 miles beyond this spectrum). Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tamerlane” invites the reader to behold Samarkand as the “queen of Earth,” the supreme monument to Timur’s pride and power.

Oscar Wilde’s “The Young King” (1891) treats the city as one point in a remote Oriental panorama of splendor and catastrophe. James Elroy Flecker’s The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913) was the Princeton production’s most immediate literary precedent, and the published score confirms the inspiration by printing two stanzas from Flecker above the cast list. The musical echoes Flecker’s pilgrims and caravans, desert shadows, ringing bells, “dim-moon city of delight,” and “Golden Road to Samarkand,” but turns his restless pursuit of adventure and forbidden knowledge into a promise of romance, riches, joy, and political power.

Orientalism for the Jazz Age

    The Orientalism of Samarkand bore the unmistakable imprint of the expanding consumer culture of the United States in the 1920s, most conspicuously in the material rewards promised by its songs at every stage of the journey eastward. Contemporary American life repeatedly intrudes upon the supposedly ancient court, where characters joke about “airplane rugs,” call old-fashioned dancing “déclassé,” invoke the blues and the Black Bottom, and warn that a Morris chair is no place for the decade’s newest steps. For Princeton students and audiences across the country, Samarkand became an imagined treasure trove of worldly pleasures that magnified familiar ambitions for wealth, leisure, fashion, romance, and social advancement, while the playbill’s myriad advertisements for clothing and hats marketed purchasable tokens of its splendor after the curtain fell.

A Century Later

    Princeton University’s relationship with Central Asia has changed profoundly since Samarkand, and the play’s centenary invites recognition of both the distance between the theatrical imagination of the region it invoked and the scholarship that has since emerged. The play’s cultural imprecision partly reflects the institutional setting of 1926, when Princeton had not yet established the department that would become Near Eastern Studies, sustained academic interest in Central Asia was inconspicuous, and Central Asians had little visible presence in the Ivy League. Leon B. Poullada, a former diplomat and political scientist who earned his doctorate at Princeton and became a prominent scholar of Afghanistan, helped lay the groundwork for this change: the memorial lecture series established in his honor in 1995 has repeatedly addressed Central Asian history and Islam.

His son, Peter Poullada, a 1975 Princeton graduate in Near Eastern Studies, later published a notable study of Turkmen history, while the department now hosts the Leon B. Poullada Postdoctoral Research Associateship in Central Asian Studies. As a relatively small university, Princeton still lacks a regional program devoted exclusively to Central Asia, but the region receives sustained attention through the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia and the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies within the Department of Near Eastern Studies, as well as research conducted by faculty and doctoral students in the History, Near Eastern Studies, and East Asian Studies departments.

Princeton-trained historians such as James Pickett have become leading scholars of Central Asia; the Department of History has hosted Sarah Cameron as a visiting scholar; and recent conferences and colloquia held at Princeton have featured lectures delivered by Artemy Kalinovsky and Scott Levi. Princeton Near Eastern Studies professor Michael Reynolds’s forthcoming biography, A Life Lived like a Storm, follows Enver Pasha through a final, dramatic chapter of the former Ottoman war minister’s career in Central Asia. In March 2024, Princeton’s Central Asian Student Association received formal recognition as an undergraduate organization. A century after Samarkand staged Central Asia as a playground for American fantasy, Princeton is now a leading institution in the study of the region.

By Diego Benning Wang.

Diego Benning Wang is a historian of Eurasia and Eastern Europe. Having received a PhD in history from Princeton University, an MA in Russian studies from Columbia University, and a BA in Russian studies from New York University, he is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University.

The post Ivy League Orientalism: Staging Samarkand in Princeton, 1926 appeared first on Novastan English.

Following a small river from the mountains into the Kazakh steppe, filmmaker Kristina Mikhailova set out to imagine its dreams. Five years later, the journey had become a portrait of Kazakhstan told through the voices of its women – and an intensely personal exploration of freedom, identity and belonging.

A small river runs for 130 kilometres through Kazakhstan, beginning among mountain peaks and glaciers before gradually disappearing into the vast landscape below. When filmmaker Kristina Mikhailova first decided to follow the Aksay from beginning to end, she imagined making a film about the river’s dreams.

Five years later, that idea had become something much larger.

Along the river, Kristina interviewed around 100 women, asking each an unusual question: if you were a river, what kind of river would you be? Fifteen of them eventually became part of River Dreams, a 98-minute film in which the Aksay serves simultaneously as landscape, witness and metaphor.

What emerged is not simply a portrait of a river. Through women’s stories of freedom, violence, dignity and belonging, the film became what its director describes as “a political portrait of Kazakhstan through a female perspective”.

The film has since travelled internationally, receiving around 30 festival invitations and and winning the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury in the Forum section at the 2026 Berlinale. It has also drawn enthusiastic audiences closer to home, including three sold-out screenings in Kazakhstan and a packed morning screening in Kyrgyzstan, where it won Best Feature-Length Documentary Film at the UmutDoc International Documentary Film Festival in Bishkek.

Yet bringing the film to a wider audience in Kazakhstan itself has proved much more difficult. Kristina says censorship has prevented River Dreams from securing the domestic release she wants.

For Novastan, Kristina Mikhailova spoke with Novastan Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine about the “sisterhood of rivers”, the women she met along the Aksay, her Ukrainian grandmother’s memories, female agency and violence, her identity as a Russian Kazakhstani, and the painful experience of feeling deeply attached to a country that she sometimes feels is pushing her away.

A sisterhood of rivers

Novastan: The film began with the idea of following the Aksay River for its entire 130-kilometre course. What were you looking for when you first set out?

Kristina Mikhailova: When I started filming, I was very young. This was the idea for my first feature-length film: I wanted to follow the river all the way, 130 kilometres from beginning to end, and imagine what it might dream about – to film those dreams as I saw them.

But after walking the entire river alone, I saw how much it changed along the way. I wanted to capture those changes and see reality through the river’s eyes, to personify it. I was working with a post-humanist approach and looking for a way to give the river a voice.

That is how I came up with the idea of asking the girls who lived along the river what kind of rivers they would be.

That question immediately helped me understand the person in front of me and shape the conversation in a way that allowed her to share something very important to her. In the Kazakhstani context, very little space is often given to women’s perspectives. It mattered to me that, as a woman, I was creating such a space, and that through the film other women could have that space too.

Gradually, what emerged was a political portrait of Kazakhstan through a female perspective.

Why did you choose the Aksay in particular?

Aksay, or Aksaika, is a very small, modest river. I wanted to film precisely this kind of inconspicuous river, because we have so many of them.

Its journey is typical of many mountain rivers in Central Asia: they begin among mountain peaks and glaciers and then disappear somewhere in the steppe or flow into lakes, never reaching the ocean.

By filming Aksay, I was also filming all these other rivers. I called it a “sisterhood of rivers”.

It is funny because I once heard someone say that the film shows some of the negative aspects of women’s lives in Kazakhstan because I had chosen the “wrong” river – one that was too insignificant. Apparently, if I had chosen some great, “proper” river, the story would have turned out differently.

I doubt it.

Making female agency visible

You interviewed around 100 women during the making of the film, with 15 eventually appearing in the final version. What did these encounters teach you?

First and foremost, I learned about myself.

Recently, I started thinking about how I changed over the five years it took to make the film. Of course, I established myself as a filmmaker, my name became known and new opportunities opened up. But something much more personal happened too: I discovered myself as a woman of Kazakhstan. I saw who I was.

Through meeting other women, I realised how different we are and how many pains we share. I came to understand relationships between men and women better – and men themselves, too.

For me, it was a genuine step up in my understanding of myself. One film led to so many personal discoveries.

Freedom seems to be one of the central themes of the film. Did making it change the way you understood freedom and the restrictions women face?

I am glad you noticed the theme of freedom because, for me, it was one of the key themes on a human level.

While making the film, I realised how many layers restrictions can have. Some are so deeply embedded and so difficult even to recognise that overcoming them can sometimes seem utopian.

But if we are talking about empowerment, then yes, absolutely. And women expand these possibilities for themselves.

I think every one of the 100 girls I interviewed, and each of the 15 who eventually appeared in the film, helped create a safe space through her story and her willingness to share her vulnerability – a safe space for all of us within those 98 minutes.

It is a space that women throughout Kazakhstan can enter.

That is why I am trying so hard to secure a wide release for the film in Kazakhstan. I want every Kazakhstani woman to be able to see it. Its distribution title is Qyz Republic.

The film deals with difficult experiences, including violence, but the women are never reduced to victims. Was challenging stereotypical representations of women something you consciously set out to do?

I did not explicitly set out to move away from stereotypical representations of women. I had a different objective: to make female agency visible.

That sounds slightly paradoxical, but there is a need for it.

Above all, I wanted my girls to feel strong.

I think both men and women can connect with that experience. But for girls in particular, the film creates a place where they can recognise themselves, feel seen and feel strong – where they can see themselves as capable of preserving their dignity despite everything.

The culmination of this, of course, comes in the final scenes involving violence. At that point, the conflict becomes completely explicit – almost black and white.

But in my view, not one of my girls looks like a victim.

The river as witness

The landscape itself seems to function almost like another character. How did you want the river and its surroundings to appear on screen?

The landscape is definitely my silent witness – the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

I always wanted the landscape cinematography to be minimalist and static, without camera movement. I wanted it to record impartially whatever was in front of it, creating what my cinematographer calls “moving photographs”.

I wanted to leave room for a transcendental experience beyond my own statement, so that each viewer could develop their own idea of the river through these landscapes.

I did not want to dramatise them or deliberately select only emotionally charged scenery. I showed the landscapes as the river passed through them, from beginning to end.

Of course, a lot had to be left out, but I think the film still gives you a sense of roughly every ten kilometres of the river’s journey.

I wanted the landscape to speak for itself.

A grandmother’s river

Your grandmother also appears in the film, although you did not originally intend for her to be part of it. How did her story enter the film?

I think I inherited my particular attentiveness to the world around me from my grandmother.

She understood the world intuitively. The war had a profound impact on her childhood – on where and how she was able to study – and eventually brought her to Kazakhstan as a little girl.

When my grandmother arrived here, she spoke only Ukrainian. She did not know Russian. I think that sharpened her perception too: she had to read reality and learn from it through observation.

I had not originally planned to include my grandmother in the film. I simply decided to speak with her by the river about our family history and her past. Then, during the editing process, I found this moment when she suddenly comes alive while remembering the river of her childhood.

My grandmother is 93. That is almost a century. Yet both the river of her childhood in Siberia and my river in Kazakhstan can overflow, flooding houses and cities.

Through my grandmother’s memory, I wanted this sense of timelessness to enter the film.

“I belong entirely to this place”

The film is multilingual, much like Kazakhstan itself. How does your own identity shape the perspective from which you portray the country?

I love the fact that the film turned out to be multilingual – just like our reality in Kazakhstan. I see that as an advantage.

But I understand that, as a Kazakhstani whose passport says “Russian”, I have my own perspective. It cannot express the general mood surrounding identity in Kazakhstan.

Speaking purely about my own feelings, I belong entirely to this place. I am deeply connected to it.

But sometimes – or often? – I feel that it is trying to push me out.

I feel that both as a Russian Kazakhstani and as a woman and filmmaker.

At the same time, there is nowhere else on Earth where I feel so needed, or where I can so easily find common ground with people.

I understand everything here. Unfortunately, I cannot accept everything.

Between documentary and visual art

River Dreams combines documentary filmmaking with dreams, metaphor, music and highly stylised imagery. Did you ever think of it as a conventional documentary?

From the beginning, I was not making a traditional documentary. For me, it was a large artistic practice that happened to come closest to documentary cinema.

Essentially, I was making visual and conceptual art.

So I did not restrict the means I could use. I looked for ways of expressing my metaphors through different images, visual registers and the editing itself.

In the end, I think the river itself dictated what its dreams should look like.

I receive very different reactions to these techniques. Some people call them outstanding. Some see them as nothing more than B-roll. Some say they are not poetic at all, while others find them endlessly poetic. Some people think they are naive.

I like the fact that they provoke an emotional response and make the imagination work. I think that is what real cinema should do.

At least, that is what cinema does to me. And I am glad my film has had that effect on other people.

Music also plays a prominent role in the film. What did you want it to contribute?

Music plays a very important role.

The film includes several compositions by a Scottish artist I like and a track by a well-known American artist. But the most important element for me is the a cappella singing.

It appears four times. I perform one short melody myself, while the others are sung by girls I met along the river. Then, at the end, there is a music video featuring the classic line-up of the group KeshYOU, which becomes a separate, meta-ironic statement for me.

I feel no affinity with the idea, familiar across the post-Soviet space, that “real cinema” should not have music.

I use music because, for me, it speaks first and foremost to our emotions. And it fits this film particularly well because the film’s structure is itself profoundly emotional.

Success abroad, censorship at home

The film has now travelled widely and received considerable international recognition. What has the response been like?

By the time we are recording this interview, the Kazakhstani premiere has already taken place and we have had three sold-out screenings.

In Kyrgyzstan, we filled a cinema at 9:30 in the morning and won the festival’s Grand Prix. The film has received an award at the Berlinale and around 30 festival invitations around the world.

Soon I will leave for a three-month tour through Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. The US premiere has already taken place in New York, and the Latin American premiere is coming next.

But despite all of this, I am still struggling to get the film into general release at home.

The reason is censorship.

I hope we will manage to overcome it, but as an artist I find the fact that I constantly have to fight simply humiliating.

It is still difficult for me to cope with the enormous pain of not being accepted at the state or industry level.

And yet the reaction from audiences in Kazakhstan itself seems to have been very different. How do you reconcile those two experiences?

Kazakhstan is also my audience – both women and men.

The film received an extraordinary and deeply emotional response here. I saw rivers of tears. I heard so many people open up to me after the screenings.

And my heart is torn between my love for my homeland and the searing pain of feeling that it rejects me.

I do not yet know how to resolve that contradiction.

I tried to express it in the film.

“The universe is my country”

After five years making this film and speaking to so many people along the river, how do you think about Kazakhstan’s future?

I think about the country’s future as the future of the people who live in it.

In Kazakhstan, I have met so many people who give me hope. They express their opinions openly. They value their freedom and are prepared to fight for it. They create space for others. They make the people around them happier.

But there have also been periods when I encountered many people filled with self-censorship and despair – people who seem no longer to regard their own dignity as something inviolable.

That is why thinking about the country’s future is very painful for me at the moment.

In the film, I describe a dream I had as a child. I am a baby who keeps growing and expanding until I reach the dimensions of the universe, but I never reach its boundaries.

Now I feel as though I am that baby again, and the universe is my country, Kazakhstan.

Maybe I need to go beyond its boundaries. Maybe I am already outgrowing them.

But I do not know.

My family lives here.

I love this place very deeply.

By Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan English.

The post “River Dreams”: A river, 100 women and a portrait of Kazakhstan appeared first on Novastan English.

Uzbekistan’s Armenian community has rebuilt churches, cultural centres and schools since the end of the Soviet period. Yet as Armenian increasingly gives way to Russian in everyday life, community leaders face a more difficult question: what does it mean to remain Armenian when language is no longer the principal marker of identity?

Several years ago, an elderly woman arrived at the Armenian cultural centre in Tashkent carrying books.

She was around 80 years old and had decided to donate her Armenian-language library to the community. For Georgiy Saakov, one of the eldest figures of Uzbekistan’s Armenian community, the encounter seemed at first like an illustration of cultural continuity. Then he addressed her in Armenian.

She answered in Russian. She did not speak the language of the books she had preserved.

“A grandmother who is Armenian but does not speak Armenian – a hundred years ago, that would have been difficult to imagine,” Saakov recalls.

The episode captures one of the central paradoxes facing Armenians in Uzbekistan today. Since the late Soviet period, the community has reconstructed much of the institutional infrastructure that disappeared during the twentieth century: cultural organisations, Sunday schools, churches, publications and artistic groups. Yet the transmission of Armenian itself has become increasingly fragile.

For Saakov, who has been editing the magazine of the Armenian community in Uzbekistan and has spent decades involved in its cultural institutions, this is not simply a linguistic issue. It raises a larger question about how minority identities survive in a society where integration has been extensive, intermarriage is common and Russian often functions more naturally than Armenian within Armenian families themselves.

Uzbekistan’s Armenians are far from disappearing. But what it means to be Armenian in Uzbekistan is changing.

A community older than the Soviet Union

Armenian connections with what is now Uzbekistan long predate the establishment of modern Central Asian states.

Christian communities existed in the region centuries before the Russian conquest, and Armenian merchants, craftsmen and religious missioners travelled through Central Asian commercial centres at different moments. Historical sources also point to Armenians being moved towards Samarkand during the campaigns of Timur, although the scale and precise character of these movements are difficult to establish.

Saakov situates the community within this much longer history. He points in particular to Samarkand, one of the great crossroads of Eurasian trade, where Armenian merchants and craftsmen were among the many groups who settled over the centuries.

Yet the roots of today’s Armenian community are more recent.

Its modern formation accelerated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alongside the Russian Empire’s expansion into Central Asia and the construction of the Trans-Caspian railway. Armenians arrived as railway workers, merchants, craftsmen, professionals and officials, joining the increasingly diverse urban populations of cities such as Tashkent and Samarkand.

By the early Soviet period, Armenians had established their own community institutions. Saakov describes Armenian Workers’ Houses operating in cities including Tashkent and Samarkand during the 1920s and 1930s, alongside cultural activities and an Armenian theatre.

This institutional life did not survive the Stalinist period. Independent ethnic, religious and cultural organisations were suppressed or absorbed into Soviet structures, while religious institutions across the USSR came under intense pressure.

As with many Soviet minorities living outside their titular republics, Armenians in Uzbekistan remained visible as individuals but increasingly lost the autonomous institutional spaces through which language and community life had previously been reproduced.

That distinction matters. Soviet modernisation did not necessarily eliminate Armenian identity, but it changed the mechanisms through which it was transmitted.

Rebuilding after decades of interruption

The late 1980s brought a new opening.

As perestroika loosened restrictions on cultural and religious organisation, Armenians in Uzbekistan began rebuilding community structures that had disappeared decades earlier. Armenian cultural centres emerged in Tashkent, Samarkand and Andijan from 1989 onwards, part of a broader revival of ethnic and cultural associations across the Soviet Union.

The process continued after Uzbekistan became independent in 1991.

The Armenian cultural centre in Tashkent established a Sunday school in 1993. In Samarkand, the Armenian Apostolic Church of Surb Astvatsatsin, built at the beginning of the twentieth century, reopened in 1995 after decades of closure. A second Armenian Apostolic church, dedicated to St Philip, was established in Tashkent in 2007.

Since 2001, Armenian organisations have operated within Uzbekistan’s system of national cultural centres, through which recognised ethnic communities organise language classes, cultural events and other activities.

For Saakov, this institutional reconstruction is one of the most important achievements of the post-Soviet period.

Today, Armenian cultural life in Uzbekistan includes dance and musical groups, educational initiatives, religious communities and the newspaper Depi Apaga, meaning “Towards the Future”, which began publication in 2006. Saakov has served as its editor since 2008.

The idea for the publication, he says, was encouraged by an encounter connected to Charles Aznavour’s visit to Samarkand for the Sharq Taronalari international music festival in 2005. For a dispersed community without its own territorial concentration, a newspaper offered another way of maintaining a shared public space.

The community also celebrates Armenian cultural figures whose lives became closely connected to Uzbekistan.

Perhaps the best known is Tamara Khanum, born Tamara Petrosyan, the Armenian-origin dancer and singer who became one of the most celebrated performers of Soviet Uzbekistan. Others include artists, musicians, academics and public figures whose biographies reflect the degree to which Armenian and Uzbek cultural histories became intertwined.

For Saakov, this is an important part of the community’s identity. Armenians in Uzbekistan do not understand themselves simply as a diaspora temporarily residing outside Armenia. Many families have lived in Central Asia for generations.

They are both Armenian and Uzbek.

How many Armenians are there?

The size of the community is difficult to establish precisely.

The last Soviet census, conducted in 1989, recorded more than 50,000 Armenians in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Saakov estimates that around 40,000 to 45,000 Armenians may live in Uzbekistan today, with the largest concentration in Tashkent.

That figure should be understood as a community estimate rather than the result of a recent population census.

Numbers alone also reveal relatively little about participation.

As in many diaspora communities, there is a substantial difference between identifying as Armenian and regularly taking part in Armenian institutional life. Churches, cultural centres and community organisations may represent the community symbolically while involving only a fraction of those who claim Armenian ancestry.

That gap has become one of the central challenges facing community organisations.

The problem is not necessarily hostility or pressure from the surrounding society. Saakov portrays Armenians as deeply integrated into contemporary Uzbekistan and emphasises that the community is able to operate openly.

Instead, the pressures are subtler: assimilation, generational change, migration and language loss.

When Russian becomes the family language

Of these, language may be the most consequential.

Russian has long played an important role among urban Armenian communities across much of the former Soviet Union. In Uzbekistan, it became particularly significant as Armenians interacted with other minorities and with Russian-speaking urban environments.

Read more on Novastan: How Central Asia became home for the Koryo-Saram

Over time, Russian also entered the home.

For many Armenian families in Uzbekistan today, Russian and Uzbek languages are used to communicate with neighbours or colleagues. But Russian is mostly the only language in which parents speak to their children and children speak to their grandparents.

But the survival of Armenian has been developing by many ways while the cultural identification remains strong.

Saakov has written about the role traditionally played by grandmothers in transmitting language, customs and memory. His formulation – “Cherchez la grand-mère” – reflects his belief that identity historically survived less through formal institutions than through families.

The elderly woman who brought Armenian books to the cultural centre therefore represented something larger than an individual biography. The books had survived. The language had not.

Perhaps that is one of the most important limit the post-Soviet Armenian revival in Uzbekistan encounters.

A Sunday school can teach vocabulary. A church can preserve ritual. A cultural centre can organise many events, including dance performances and commemorations. A newspaper can remind readers of Armenian historical and cultural identity.

Identity beyond language

Yet language loss does not necessarily mean the disappearance of Armenian identity.

This is where Saakov’s understanding of the community becomes particularly interesting.

He cites the Armenian historian Claude Mutafian’s formulation: “Être Arménien, c’est un choix” – being Armenian is a choice.

For Armenians in Uzbekistan, that choice may increasingly take forms other than speaking Armenian fluently.

It may involve attending church on major holidays, sending children to a Sunday school, participating in cultural events, reading about Armenian history, maintaining family traditions or simply continuing to identify with an Armenian ancestry that has existed alongside Uzbek, Russian and Soviet experiences for generations.

The community’s cultural groups reflect this attempt to preserve identity through practice.

Organisations and ensembles such as Mer Ojakh, Arvest and DAR bring together different generations around music, dance and cultural events. Their significance is not only artistic. They create spaces where a community that is geographically dispersed can physically encounter itself.

At the same time, the reliance on organised culture raises another question: what happens when identity becomes something performed at scheduled events rather than reproduced through everyday life?

That tension is not unique to Armenians.

Across Central Asia, smaller ethnic communities are negotiating similar changes. Soviet-era migration, urbanisation, mixed marriages, Russian-language education, independence and more recent emigration have transformed the relationship between ethnicity, language and citizenship.

The Armenian experience in Uzbekistan therefore offers a broader window onto the post-Soviet evolution of minority identity.

Integration without disappearance

Saakov strongly rejects the idea that Armenian identity and integration into Uzbek society are contradictory.

He describes Armenians as participating extensively in the professional, cultural and social life of the country and points to the absence of a strong divide between Armenian and Uzbek public identities.

There is historical substance to that argument. Prominent Armenians contributed to Soviet and post-Soviet Uzbekistan in fields ranging from culture to science, while generations of Armenian families have developed ties to cities such as Tashkent and Samarkand that are as biographical as their ties to Armenia.

But integration also complicates attempts to define where one community ends and another begins.

Read more on Novastan: At home in Central Asia: the lives and identity of the Lyuli/Mughat

An Armenian family may speak Russian at home, Uzbek at work or school, retain an Armenian surname, celebrate Armenian religious holidays and regard Uzbekistan as its homeland.

The resulting identity does not fit easily into models that imagine diasporas as culturally self-contained communities looking permanently towards an ancestral state.

For younger Armenians, Armenia may be important symbolically even when they have never lived there. Uzbekistan, meanwhile, is not simply a “host country” but the country in which their families may have lived for several generations.

Read more on Novastan: From Bukhara to Queens: The Global Journey of the Bukharan Jews

This distinction helps explain why the Armenian community’s future is unlikely to depend on preserving an unchanged version of the past.

Its challenge is instead to determine which parts of that inheritance remain meaningful.

A post-Soviet minority dilemma

The story of Uzbekistan’s Armenians is therefore not one of straightforward disappearance or revival.

The revival is real. Institutions that had vanished under Soviet rule have been rebuilt. Churches under the leadership of Ter Hovhannes Grigoryan, the spiritual mentor of the Armenian community in Uzbekistan, continues to function successfully. The Armenian National Cultural Center of Uzbekistan, led by Vladislav Safarov, along with regional cultural centers in Tashkent and Samarkand, headed by Armen Sahakyan and Armen Der-Avanesyants, are doing their best and carrying out extensive work across various fields. Cultural organisations operate openly and the Government of Uzbekistan extends full-scale assistance and support to the community organization.

Armenian history is commemorated. Children can attend community classes. Publications and artistic groups maintain a collective public presence.

At the same time, the social foundations on which those institutions once rested have changed profoundly.

The family is less reliably Armenian-speaking. Community participation is selective. Identity competes with migration, mixed backgrounds and increasingly individual definitions of belonging.

For Saakov, this makes transmission the decisive question.

The elderly woman who arrived with her books had preserved the physical objects of Armenian culture for decades. But the language connecting her directly to them had disappeared somewhere along the way.

Her story may seem melancholy, but Saakov does not present the community’s future simply in terms of decline.

If being Armenian is, as Mutafian suggested, a choice, then every generation makes that choice under different circumstances.

In Uzbekistan today, the question is no longer whether Armenian institutions can exist. They can, and they do.

The harder question is what people will choose to do with them.

By Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan English.

The post Between integration and inheritance: How Armenians in Uzbekistan are redefining community appeared first on Novastan English.

In August-September 2026, the annual Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit took place in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Initially conceived as a platform for regional security cooperation, the organization used its 2026 summit to reiterate demands for a multipolar international order through appeals to Eurasian connectivity. State-overseen media in some of the organization’s authoritarian member states repeatedly invoked euphemistic terms such as “Silk Road” and “Digital Silk Road” alongside declarations of multipolarity. These references accompanied efforts by regional powers, particularly China and Russia, to secure recognition as global powers and challenge the predominance the United States has exercised since the end of the Cold War. For the post-Soviet states of Central Asia and the South Caucasus, embracing the Silk Road paradigm presents a particular dilemma, as they seek greater international recognition through a framework that designates them primarily as intermediaries between larger powers.

Read more on Novastan: In Central Asia, China is taking advantage of Russia’s isolation at war

The Making of the Silk Road Paradigm

 Since the early 2010s, the Silk Road has become a pervasive framework for representing Central Asia and the South Caucasus in tourism, scholarship, current affairs, and policy analysis. Many hotels and travel agencies in these regions bear the name or feature imagery of camels and caravans, while international tour operators market visits to these countries as Silk Road journeys. Conferences and institutional associations, including the Tbilisi Silk Road Forum and the Silk Road Universities Network, adopt the same designation. American academic institutions have also embraced it, most notably the Silk Road Studies Program formerly affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and Indiana University’s incipient Silk Road Studies program.

Uyghur and Uzbek restaurants across Western Europe and North America operate under names such as “Silk Road” and “Caravan.” The Chinese-American cello virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma applied the same paradigm to musical performance through his Silk Road project, conceived in 1998. Its eclectic ensemble reduces the rich musical traditions of various Eurasian nations to one or two representative performers, prioritizing national representation over demonstrating genuine historical musical connections across Eurasia. In a 2021 video from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the popular Emirati food blogger Khalid al-Ameri gleefully attributes the enormous portions of Tashkent-style pilaf (to’y oshi) to the appetites of merchants traversing the Silk Road, as if local culinary traditions existed chiefly to serve transient traders.

    The Silk Road paradigm was popularized in the former Soviet space during late perestroika, almost a quarter-century before China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, as  late Soviet and early post-Soviet publications attest. UNESCO provided institutional endorsement by launching a research program dedicated to the “Silk Roads” in 1988. In 1994, the Samarkand Declaration on Silk Road Tourism established a framework for international cooperation to promote the region’s historical routes and cultural heritage. Four years later, Baku hosted a conference on the restoration of the historic Silk Road under the EU’s auspices. The United States adopted the designation for its own New Silk Road initiative in 2011. Uzbekistan’s 2009 postage stamps promoted the theme, followed by subsequent issues depicting mapped routes, camels, caravans, and other popular Silk Road imagery. Russia also issued a Silk Road commemorative coin honoring the Eurasian Economic Community. The tourism expansion across post-Soviet Eurasia in the 2010s further encouraged Silk Road branding. For the newly independent states of Central Asia and the South Caucasus, the paradigm offered a means of asserting historical identities and international significance after the Soviet collapse amid the limitations of established Western regional classifications, as Central Asia and the South Caucasus fitted awkwardly within conventional definitions of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, or South Asia.

    Scholarship and popular historical writing in the English-speaking world have helped popularize the Silk Road as a framework for interpreting Central and Inner Eurasia. Valerie Hansen and Susan Whitfield have made substantial contributions to the study of underexplored communities and cultural encounters through works organized around this designation. Christopher Beckwith’s monograph applies the term to a broad history of Central Eurasia while emphasizing the historical agency of the region’s vernacular communities. Peter Frankopan adopts the pluralized Silk Roads for an expansive Eurasian synthesis for a general readership. In their accounts of premodern Eurasia, these authors organize historical interpretation around a designation that did not exist during the periods under examination. Maps of the Silk Road and its supposed branches, now ubiquitous in tourist promotions and geopolitical analysis, further reinforce the impression that the term describes a coherent framework. References to the Silk Road also supply historical context in prominent Anglophone media outlets’ reporting on the dire human rights situation of the Uyghurs.

    The Silk Road paradigm often entails a teleological interpretation of Eurasian history by projecting the modern concept of globalization onto premodern exchanges. Conventional accounts describe a network of routes linking China with Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean from the period when the Han and Roman empires coexisted to the mid- or late fifteenth century, before the Age of Discoveries fundamentally reshaped global connections. Replacing a single road with a plurality of routes leaves largely intact the presumption that these exchanges constituted a coherent and enduring trans-Eurasian system. The term itself was a nineteenth-century coinage, appearing in Carl Ritter’s work in 1838 before the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen gave it greater scholarly prominence in 1877. The existence of exchanges between distant regions does not establish that the people involved shared a conception of a unified system joining Eurasia’s eastern and western extremities. Treating their activities as successive stages of globalization risks attributing a common direction to interactions shaped by distinct local circumstances and changing sociopolitical realities. The conventional fifteenth-century endpoint similarly obscures the continuation of overland exchange across the Eurasian landmass into the modern period.

    The Silk Road has also acquired a geographical scope that encompasses entire regions of Central and Inner Eurasia. In this usage, Central Asia, Iran, the Caucasus, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia fall under a common designation derived from their association with routes connecting China with Europe. The term consequently covers the political, social, religious, and cultural histories of these territories, including developments whose significance extends well beyond commercial or cultural transmission. This usage conflates the history of connections among regions with the histories of the regions themselves. Establishing that a society participated in a network of exchange provides limited justification for treating that network as the principal framework for interpreting its historical development.

Between China and Europe

    The Silk Road paradigm presents China and Europe as the principal cultural and commercial centers of premodern Eurasia, relegating the intervening lands and peoples to an intermediary position within a linear rather than territorial conception of space. This hierarchy obscures the development of local political institutions and intellectual traditions, assigning historical importance primarily according to a society’s contribution to exchanges between the two endpoints.

The mathematical scholarship of al-Khwarazmi, the philosophical and medical writings of Avicenna, the musical theories of al-Farabi, the astronomical discoveries of al-Biruni, the linguistic and ethnographic works of Mahmud al-Kashgari, and the poetry of Ferdowsi, Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Ahmad Yasawi, Yusuf Balasaguni, and Ali-Shir Nawa’i exemplify contributions whose significance exceeds the transmission of ideas between distant centers and deserves consideration in its own right. Even when exchange remains the principal subject of inquiry, emphasizing these two endpoints understates India’s importance. During the Roman period, Mediterranean commerce with India, often through Central Asia, was considerably more voluminous than commerce with China. The Seleucid Empire and the Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms had sustained earlier political and cultural connections, whose Hellenistic legacies persisted beyond their rule.

    The Silk Road paradigm’s Sino-centrism and Euro-centrism often obscure the cultural agency of vernacular communities in Central Eurasia. Communities selectively adapted and appropriated cultural imports, changing their forms and significance before they circulated further. Scholars such as al-Khwarazmi elaborated the Indian system underlying Arabic numerals before it reached Europe. Chess acquired new rules, pieces, and social meanings as it spread from India through Persia and onward to Europe, with “checkmate” being a Persian loan. Christian communities adapted Syriac script to write Sogdian and Old Uyghur. Regional variants of instruments such as the zurna, qanun, and kamancha differ in construction and performance practice, reflecting the musical traditions and preferences of the communities that developed them. Regional preparations of noodles (laghman, lamian), dumplings (chuchvara, manti), fried dough (çäkçäk, tush, sachima), and fruit leathers (lavashak, guodanpi) also require attention to local specificities.

Exchange Beyond Trade

The Silk Road paradigm’s emphasis on commerce often obscures the role of conquest, pastoral mobility, and permanent migration in facilitating cultural exchange across Eurasia. Scythian expansions and the Arab, Mongol, and Timurid conquests intensified cultural contacts through military service, imperial rule, and population displacement, frequently under conditions of extreme violence. Timur’s deportation of artisans from conquered cities to Samarkand made forced migration a major source of the Timurid capital’s architectural and artistic achievements. Similar developments followed Shah Abbas I’s deportation of Armenians from Nakhichevan to Isfahan, where churches combined Armenian and Safavid architectural characteristics. Nomadic communities sustained other forms of exchange through seasonal movement and recurrent encounters with settled populations.

Research on mountain routes through Inner Asia suggests that pastoral mobility helped establish some of the connections subsequently used by long-distance traders. The migrations of Qypchaqs, Seljuks, Kalmyks and other Oirat groups, and Alans carried military practices, oral literature, and material culture into new settings, where interactions with settled populations encouraged further adaptation. Jewish diasporic communities across Central Eurasia maintained connections through kinship, religious institutions, and scholarship, sustaining exchanges that extended beyond the activities of merchants, best exemplified by the Moroccan-born rabbi Yosef Maimon’s efforts to promote religious education and Sephardic liturgical practices among Bukharan Jewish communities in Central Asia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Commerce itself often depended on the routes and social relationships established through these movements.

Silk Without China

The history of silk production further undermines the Silk Road paradigm’s Sino-centrism. Sericulture had spread into Central Asia and Iran well before the thirteenth century, and tenth-century geographical accounts describe silk production across much of Iran. Communities developed their own practices of silkworm breeding and textile manufacture, while Shaki and Shamakhi in modern-day northern Azerbaijan became important centers of silk production and trade in the Caucasus. Before Azerbaijan took control of the city in late 2023, one of the main streets of Stepanakert (Khankandi), the de facto capital of Armenian-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh, was called Silk Weavers’ Street (Metaqsagorts’neri poghots).

The smooth, colorful khan atlas (“royal silk”), produced most famously in the ancient city of Margilan in the Ferghana Valley, is widely regarded as a national symbol of Uzbekistan. The expansion of production diversified the sources of silk entering regional and distant markets while sustaining its commercial importance. Raw silk remained a major export of Safavid Iran in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Iranian workshops produced luxury fabrics for domestic consumption and foreign buyers. In Shaki, wealth from silkworm breeding and cocoon sales supported urban development in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as reflected in the magnificent summer palace of the Shaki khans. These economies depended on local agricultural conditions and commercial institutions and could sustain production and exchange without continuous input from China. The association of silk with China, therefore, provides little justification for assigning a subordinate historical role to societies that became substantial producers and exporters themselves.

From Historical Metaphor to Geopolitical Strategy

    The Silk Road paradigm’s retrospective Sino-centrism also lends historical legitimacy to the Chinese government’s contemporary geopolitical ambitions. China’s position among the largest premodern economies provides an insufficient basis for assuming comparably extensive political influence, cultural ties, or transit connections with the principal centers of Central Eurasia and beyond. The extent and character of these connections varied considerably across periods, depending on changing political arrangements and networks sustained by communities and Eurasian land empires with their own interests and institutions.

Read more on Novastan: China in Central Asia: Fact-checking and myth-busting

Official Chinese presentations of BRI invoke the pluralized historical Silk Roads to portray contemporary transit investments as the renewal of historical connections. This presumed continuity frames the expansion of Chinese interests as restoring a lost position, encouraging acceptance of Beijing’s ambitions to reshape Eurasia’s political and economic development. Central Asia and South Caucasus states embrace the same framework to attract Chinese investment, promote transit infrastructure centered around China, and secure greater international recognition. Their self-presentation as intermediaries risks making that recognition contingent on their usefulness to larger powers, while reinforcing a historical hierarchy that privileges China’s geopolitical objectives.

Read more on Novastan: China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway: Who wins from Central Asia’s new trade route?

Marco Polo and the Politics of Eurasian Space

    The Silk Road paradigm’s anachronistic Sino-centrism also appears in bestselling American author Robert Kaplan’s use of Marco Polo’s travels to interpret contemporary geopolitics. In The Return of Marco Polo’s World, Kaplan uses the Venetian traveler’s itinerary to explain the strategic significance of China’s expanding connections across Eurasia and the Indian Ocean. The itinerary of a single traveler offers limited grounds for establishing either the density of historical exchange or a common geopolitical orientation among the societies he encountered. Polo’s journeys depended on Mongol imperial arrangements and networks maintained by merchants, religious communities, and local authorities, whose activities served numerous purposes beyond connecting Europe with China.

Kaplan explicitly presents Kublai Khan’s empire as a guide to contemporary Chinese strategy, encouraging the interpretation of Mongol-era connections as precedents for China’s present ambitions, although Chinggisid imperial domains encompassed much of Eurasia and included political centers well beyond China. This analogy risks attributing a continuous geopolitical agenda to distinct political entities and subordinating other Eurasian societies to a narrative of Chinese resurgence. Kaplan’s advocacy of a sustained American naval presence also exposes a tension in his emphasis on Chinese centrality: American naval power helps sustain the maritime trading system on which China depends, while US military positions and alliances along the First and Second Island Chains constrain China’s pursuit of predominance in the western Pacific.

What the Eurasian Frame Leaves Out

    The Silk Road paradigm’s Eurasian frame also erases the Western Hemisphere when used to interpret contemporary global power dynamics. The United States, which emerged from the Cold War as the sole superpower, lies outside this paradigm’s geographical space. The postwar economic order still depends on financial arrangements shaped by American power, with the US dollar retaining its central role in international transactions, banking, and reserve holdings. The scale of the US economy and the global operations of US corporations sustain commercial relationships that cannot be adequately represented through routes joining China and Europe. American corporations, especially those based in Silicon Valley, occupy leading positions in the global high-technology industry. US military deployments and alliances, including a naval presence along major shipping routes, remain integral to the security arrangements within which much of this commerce occurs. Interpreting Chinese infrastructure expansion primarily through a Eurasian historical frame risks overstating China’s capacity to displace American dominance by discounting the United States’ pivotal role on the global stage.

When Influence Ran East

    The history of China’s Tang dynasty (618–907) challenges Sino-centric accounts of Eurasian exchange that portray China primarily as a source rather than a recipient of cultural influence. Conventionally celebrated as an apogee of Chinese cultural achievement, the Tang period coincided with extensive political and cultural engagement with Central Asia. The Tang capital, Chang’an (Xi’an), maintained close ties with the region, where Tang campaigns and protectorates established a substantial, though uneven, presence. Turkic soldiers and commanders contributed significantly to Tang military power, while Uyghur allies provided crucial assistance during the eighth century. Central Asian music and dances shaped Tang court entertainment, notably through Sogdian dances, while the pipa, often called the Chinese lute, developed from Middle Eastern and Central Asian prototypes. Elite men and women adopted Central Asian clothing and equestrian fashions; Crown Prince Li Chengqian dressed as a Turkic khan, established a tent camp within the palace grounds, and ate mutton cut with his sword. Sogdian communities in Chang’an and other urban centers contributed to commercial, artistic, and religious life, with manuscripts recovered from the caves of Dunhuang preserving evidence of their activities and beliefs. Imported fruit varieties, vegetables, and livestock, including peaches from Samarkand and prized Central Asian horses, further demonstrate the material significance of these contacts.

Christianity and Manichaeism reached Tang China through networks connecting Iran and Central Asia. Translations of Buddhist and Christian scriptures expanded Chinese religious literature, while Buddhist translation continued an earlier process of incorporating Sanskrit terms into Chinese. Li Bai (Li Bo), among China’s most celebrated poets, may have been born in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. Popular narratives about the battle of Talas in 751, fought between the Tang dynasty and the Abbasid Caliphate, often obscure the political agency of Central Eurasian communities by crediting the Abbasid victory with bringing Chinese westward expansion to a definitive end. The conflict emerged from regional rivalries involving Ferghana and Chach, whose ruling families sought allies to advance their own interests. Karluk forces played an important part in the Tang defeat, with Chinese accounts attributing the outcome partly to their defection to the Abbasid side. Tang expansion depended heavily on Turkic troops and commanders and alliances with Sogdian rulers. Tang garrisons remained in the Tarim Basin after Talas, while An Lushan’s rebellion in 755 and subsequent Tibetan advances led to Tang’s decline. An Lushan (Rokhshan in Sogdian), a general of Sogdian and Turkic ancestry, captured two Tang capitals and forced the emperor to flee, while the prolonged conflict severely weakened the dynasty.

Beyond the Silk Road

    Prominent historian of Central Asia Scott Levi has advocated the scholarly embrace of the Silk Road paradigm despite its conceptual laxity. However, its acceptance in Western academia would inevitably lend greater legitimacy to the expansive agenda of an authoritarian dictatorship whose repressive policies have actively destroyed the communities and cultural legacies that have long formed the backbone of Western imaginations of the Silk Road.

By Diego Benning Wang.

Diego Benning Wang is a historian of Eurasia and Eastern Europe. Having received a PhD in history from Princeton University, an MA in Russian studies from Columbia University, and a BA in Russian studies from New York University, he is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University.

The post The Silk Road Paradigm and the Dilemma of In-Between appeared first on Novastan English.

In 1890, French photographer Paul Nadar travelled through Russian Turkestan, documenting cities, landscapes and everyday life along the newly built Trans-Caspian Railway. In 2026, Spanish photographer Pablo Martínez Muñiz retraced part of his journey, using Nadar’s archive to explore how Uzbekistan – and the way outsiders see it – has changed.

Paul Nadar’s journey to Turkestan

The history of nineteenth-century photography is full of epic journeys in which adventurous photographers set off to explore distant places carrying cumbersome photographic equipment.

Their motivations varied. Some, such as Girault de Prangey, travelled east as part of a broader investigation into the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Others, such as Francis Frith, used travel to produce hundreds of photographs from around the world and build an international photographic business.

Paul Nadar’s journey to Turkestan in 1890 belongs to this tradition.

Paul Nadar (1856-1939), the son of the celebrated French photographer Félix Nadar, embarked that year on a two-month journey from Paris to Tashkent. He left Paris on 24 August aboard the Orient Express and reached Constantinople three days later. From there, he crossed the Black Sea by ship to Batumi before travelling via Tiflis to Baku.

Read more on Novastan: A condensed history

After crossing the Caspian Sea, he arrived at the Russian port of Uzun-Ada, the starting point of the recently constructed Trans-Caspian Railway. He then travelled by train through Bukhara to Samarkand, before completing the final stretch to Tashkent by horse-drawn carriage.

During the journey, Nadar took approximately 1,800 photographs. Most of the negatives are now preserved at the Médiathèque du Patrimoine et de la Photographie in Paris. The Getty Research Institute also holds an album entitled Photograph Album of Turkestan, 1890, containing 74 images in an unusual circular format. Other prints are scattered across private collections.

His photographs cover a remarkably broad range of subjects. He documented the Trans-Caspian Railway, its stations, workers and passengers. He photographed local rulers – emirs and beys – in portraits strongly influenced by contemporary Orientalist aesthetics. He also captured everyday scenes in the bazaars, streets and squares of Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent, as well as monuments, landscapes and equestrian and falconry competitions.

Taken together, the photographs constitute an extraordinary documentary and ethnographic record of Central Asian society at the end of the nineteenth century.

Nadar travelled not only with the equipment required to make large 30 × 40 cm glass-plate photographs, but also with two innovative cameras: the Kodak No. 2 and the Express Détective Nadar. Their capacity to take instantaneous photographs had a noticeable impact on the visual character of his work.

Yet Nadar’s photographs also reflected a European gaze shaped by Orientalism and by the geopolitical context of Russian expansion in Central Asia. They contributed to an image of Turkestan associated with the Western fascination with the “Orient”.

Read more on Novastan: A mosaïc wall

These photographs were therefore not neutral documents. They participated in the construction of a particular European idea of Central Asia, linked to colonial imaginaries and the romantic representation of the East that developed during the nineteenth century.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of Nadar’s work lies precisely in this tension between documentation and cultural construction. His photographs have enormous historical and ethnographic value, but they also reveal a particular way of looking at and representing a territory, conditioned by the political and cultural context of his time.

Uzbekistan, 2026

During the first half of April 2026, with support from Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Tourism through the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Spain, I travelled to Uzbekistan to develop my photographic research and creation project, In the Country of Özbeg.

Taking Paul Nadar’s 1890 journey through Turkestan as its starting point, the project seeks to produce a contemporary reinterpretation of that experience through photography.

My aim was to return to some of the places photographed by Nadar and construct a new visual narrative about contemporary Uzbekistan. Rather than literally reproducing his historical photographs or indulging in nostalgia for an exotic past, I wanted to establish a dialogue between past and present – between two ways of looking at the same territory separated by more than 130 years of political, social and cultural transformation.

The Uzbekistan I encountered is, of course, radically different from the territory Nadar visited at the end of the nineteenth century. The Russian Revolution, the Soviet period and independence in 1991 were followed by profound urban, economic and cultural changes.

Read more on Novastan: Novastan Photo Contest 2026: the results

Infrastructure modernisation, the growth of tourism, the construction of a distinct national identity and the effects of globalisation have transformed both the physical landscape and everyday life.

Against this background, In the Country of Özbeg asks several questions. What remains today of the Orientalist imaginary constructed during the nineteenth century? How is Uzbek society represented now? How do contemporary processes of modernisation and tourism affect the visual representation of the country? And how can contemporary photography critically revisit images inherited from the past?

The project does not seek to provide definitive answers. Instead, it creates a space for visual reflection. I wanted to build a complex and open representation of Uzbekistan, avoiding exoticisation and focusing instead on tensions between tradition and modernity, memory and transformation, heritage and globalisation.

I worked in Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva – the latter being the only city among the four that Nadar did not visit.

Nadar’s archive remained a conceptual reference throughout the process. Some of my photographs establish direct relationships with his images, while others focus on aspects of contemporary Uzbekistan that have no direct nineteenth-century equivalent. Through this dialogue between historical archive and contemporary production, I wanted to reflect both on the transformation of the country and on the mechanisms through which photography itself constructs representations.

From Orientalism to spectacle

The nineteenth-century European Orientalist imagination perceived Central Asia as a world of madrasas, mosques and bazaars.

Today, however, there are other forms of architecture that can produce a comparable sense of visual estrangement while belonging to an entirely different historical and cultural context.

These include the striking examples of Soviet modernist and brutalist architecture found across Tashkent, from the city’s metro stations to Hotel Uzbekistan. But there are also more recent forms of architectural spectacle.

At Magic City in Tashkent, for example, an enormous fairy-tale castle reminiscent of Walt Disney architecture forms the centrepiece of an entertainment and commercial complex. It is a very different kind of exoticism from the one imagined by nineteenth-century Europeans, but one that is equally constructed through image and spectacle.

It is also significant to observe the Uzbek government’s construction of large cultural and religious complexes inspired by Timurid architecture.

This process of recovering and monumentalising the past creates new architectural icons intended both to project a national identity and attract cultural and religious tourism.

At the same time, these buildings reveal a tension between the recovery of tradition and the creation of genuinely contemporary architecture. Reproducing historical forms can produce an architecture close to scenography or pastiche, in which the past itself becomes an image used to represent the present.

Yet this tension becomes more interesting at the decorative level. Colours, geometries, latticework and motifs inherited from Central Asian traditions are being reinterpreted through new materials and technologies, producing a contemporary visual identity grounded in architectural memory.

The two images show the continuity and transformation of a characteristic Central Asian ornamental vocabulary.

Traditional combinations of brick and glazed ceramics in turquoise, blue and earth tones coexist with contemporary interpretations using glass, metal and modern construction techniques.

The same visual resources – colour, stars, diamonds and geometric grids – are rationalised into more regular patterns that not only decorate buildings but filter light and structure space.

This is therefore not simply a literal reproduction of the past. It is an aesthetic translation of heritage, in which historic forms and colours are abstracted and adapted to the present.

The Registan: from urban centre to global icon

Samarkand’s Registan is one of the places that most clearly illustrates the changes Uzbekistan has undergone over the past 130 years.

When Nadar photographed the square in 1890, it remained a centre of urban life: a place of commerce and movement, surrounded by madrasas that still served their original functions.

The buildings were in poor condition, but the space remained embedded in the everyday life of Samarkand.

Today, the Registan has become one of Uzbekistan’s most recognisable visual icons and a centre of the country’s booming tourism industry. Its monumental buildings have been extensively restored, while many of the cells that once accommodated madrasa students now contain souvenir shops.

The transformation is striking. The architecture survives, but the social function of the space has profoundly changed.

Representing Uzbek women

These photographs create a powerful visual contrast between two representations of Uzbek women separated by more than a century.

In Nadar’s photograph, the woman appears almost elusive, heavily covered and anonymous within the surrounding landscape. My photograph from 2026 presents a very different encounter: a grandmother and her granddaughter look directly at the camera with confidence and complicity.

The older woman’s traditional textile patterns coexist naturally with the younger girl’s pink sweatshirt. Their clothing, expressions and relationship suggest both continuity and change, while resisting the tendency to reduce contemporary Uzbek women to a single image of either “tradition” or “modernity”.

A globalised Uzbekistan

For me, these images capture Uzbekistan as a kind of living palimpsest, in which global modernity is written over layers of history without fully erasing them.

In the first photograph, a young Uzbek man poses in an FC Barcelona shirt. The club crest and Spotify logo form unmistakably contemporary symbols against a background of traditional brick architecture, illustrating the extent to which global mass culture has become part of local identity.

In the second, a balloon seller walks beside the historic brick walls of Bukhara’s Ark carrying a dense cluster of bright red heart-shaped balloons.

The plastic, ephemeral colour of the balloons stands in sharp contrast to the monumental architecture of a city that Nadar himself photographed in 1890.

Both photographs show how the symbols of the twenty-first century occupy the same spaces as the physical traces of historic Turkestan.

The road and the destination

These final two images bring the visual journey to a close by connecting movement with destination.

Nadar’s photograph documents the Trans-Caspian Railway, whose construction began in 1879. I find it fascinating to think that this infrastructure made his journey through the region – and therefore his photographic work – possible.

In his image, the railway appears fragile as it cuts across the desert landscape. To me, it evokes the epic quality associated with the early history of photography in this part of the world.

My photograph of Khiva’s walls represents the end of my own journey through Uzbekistan.

Read more on Novastan: In Khiva’s Old Town

Where Nadar’s image captures the infrastructure that enabled movement across the region at the end of the nineteenth century, my own gaze comes to rest on the solidity of Khiva’s adobe walls, glowing in the evening light at the final stop on my itinerary.

In placing these two photographs together, I wanted to connect the historical infrastructure that enabled Nadar’s exploration with the architecture that marked the conclusion of my own.

Epilogue

Travelling through Uzbekistan in Paul Nadar’s footsteps has helped me understand that photography documents not only space, but time.

In the Country of Özbeg was not conceived as an exercise in Orientalist nostalgia, but as a visual dialogue with a territory that is constantly being rewritten.

By confronting the photographic archive of 1890 with my own images from 2026, Uzbekistan emerges not as a static landscape, but as a society in which Timurid memory, the traces of the Soviet era and the symbols of globalisation coexist in everyday life.

My physical journey ended at the walls of Khiva, but the question of photographic representation remains open.

Looking at the present through the reflection of the past is, ultimately, one way of understanding how we construct our own identities in the mirror of history.

By Pablo Martínez Muñiz.

Pablo Martínez Muñiz is a Spanish photographer, university professor and researcher specialising in the history of nineteenth-century photography. He holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, where his doctoral research examined Orientalism in nineteenth-century photography and the relationship between photography, travel and representations of the East. His work combines artistic practice, academic research and teaching, with a particular focus on photography, territory, representation and Orientalist visual cultures. He is a professor and academic director of the Master’s Degree in Artistic Photography at the International University of La Rioja (UNIR) and a member of the Iranian Peoples Studies Group (GEPI) at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He is also part of the research project “Crossed Perspectives between the Iranian and Hispanic Worlds: Narratives and Representations in the Contemporary Era”, funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Reference: PID2023-1502740A-100).

The post In the Country of Özbeg: Photographing Uzbekistan 136 Years After Paul Nadar appeared first on Novastan English.

From Tashkent classrooms to Miami conservatories, violinist and researcher Irina Antsiferova traces how Uzbek composers transformed a Western instrument by drawing on local melodies, rhythms and performance traditions.

One of my childhood memories takes me back to Tashkent in 1992. I am sitting beside my mother in a taxi as we make our way through the city streets to my music school. The radio is playing, and suddenly the sound of a gijak, a traditional Uzbek bowed string instrument, catches my attention. I listen closely, fascinated by how familiar it sounds, and turn to my mother.

“It sounds so much like a violin!”

She nods.

We are on our way to the Uspensky Specialized Music School, where I was studying violin at the time, a school that continues to educate talented young musicians today. When I arrive for my lesson, I unpack my instrument and take out one of the pieces I am studying: Uzbek composer Nazarov’s Song and Dance.

Read more on Novastan: From Uzbekistan to Strasbourg: Aziz Shokhakimov, a conductor between cultures and languages

Suddenly, I hear a connection. The sound of the gijak that I had just heard on the radio and the music written on the page in front of me seem to belong to the same musical world.

Something clicks: this is how this music should sound.

I did not know it then, but perhaps a small researcher was already beginning to emerge inside me. That curiosity stayed with me for decades. Eventually, it led me to become a Doctor of Musical Arts and to devote my doctoral research to the role of Uzbek composers in developing repertoire for Western string instruments.

Discovering Uzbek music from America

When I later came to the United States as a student, I encountered an extraordinary mixture of musical cultures. In Miami especially, Latin American and Afro-American traditions are everywhere. I also encountered music connected with Native American traditions. Russian symphonic repertoire, meanwhile, is a familiar part of American conservatory and orchestral life.

Uzbek classical music was different.

Outside relatively specialised circles – particularly among musicians who had grown up in Uzbekistan or studied at the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan – the composers I knew so well were largely unfamiliar.

Perhaps geography plays a role. Uzbekistan is thousands of kilometres from the United States. But its musical history is anything but isolated.

For centuries, the territory of present-day Uzbekistan stood at a crossroads of cultures. Persian, Turkic, Arab, Mongol and later Russian traditions intersected there. Its position along the Silk Road and centuries of political transformation produced a musical culture in which different traditions continually encountered and reshaped one another.

During the Soviet period, another major transformation took place. New theatres, concert halls and educational institutions appeared, including the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan, founded in 1936. Western classical forms and instruments increasingly interacted with Uzbek traditional melodies, rhythms and performance practices.

The result was not simply Western music with an “Uzbek flavour”. Over time, a distinctive musical language emerged, and with it generations of composers and performers who developed their own approach to Western classical instruments, including the violin.

Read more on Novastan: When the clarinet speaks Uzbek: bringing an overlooked classical repertoire to the world

One of the most fascinating figures in this story was Georgi Mushel.

Georgi Mushel: between Russia and Uzbekistan

Georgi Mushel was born in Tambov, Russia, in 1909 and studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where his teachers included Nikolai Myaskovsky, Mikhail Gnessin and the pianist Lev Oborin. The harmonic colours of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel also left a strong impression on his musical language.

In 1936, after graduating from the Moscow Conservatory, Mushel moved to Tashkent to teach at the newly established State Conservatory of Uzbekistan. The move transformed his musical life.

He immersed himself in Uzbek traditional music and became familiar with instruments such as the surnay, doira and dutar. He worked with Uzbek musicians and collaborated with ethnographer and composer Victor Uspenskiy. He eventually arranged 55 Uzbek folk songs, a project that became something of a compositional laboratory for him.

In his earlier compositions, Mushel sometimes quoted Uzbek melodies directly. Gradually, however, the influence became deeper.

Rather than simply inserting folk tunes into European compositions, he began to absorb their musical logic: modal writing, meaning music based on scales other than the conventional Western major-minor system; recurring rhythmic patterns; and textures that evoked the sound of instruments such as the dutar.

Read more on Novastan: Finding links between electronic and folk music in “Waiting for the Sea”

The Uzbek and European elements had begun to speak the same musical language.

A violin sonata that speaks Uzbek

One of the clearest examples is Mushel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in D Minor, composed in 1950 and dedicated to Mikhail Gnessin.

The three-movement sonata follows a recognisable Western classical structure, but listening closely reveals another musical world beneath it.

The second movement, Moderato con anima, is particularly striking. It is written in an unusual 5/4 metre – five beats to a bar – and draws on the Uzbek folk melody Gazhagim (“My Curls”), which Mushel had previously harmonised as part of his collection of 55 folk songs.

But melody alone does not explain why the movement sounds Uzbek.

Rhythm is equally important.

The heartbeat beneath the melody: usul

One of the fundamental concepts in Uzbek traditional music is usul, a recurring rhythmic pattern that provides the structural foundation for a piece.

Traditionally, usul patterns can be played on the doira, a frame drum widely used in Uzbek music. Performers produce contrasting sounds, often described as bum, a lower sound struck towards the centre of the instrument, and bak, a higher sound played closer to the edge.

What fascinates me as a violinist is the relationship between this stable rhythmic foundation and the freedom of the melody above it.

The usul can remain remarkably precise while the melodic line breathes with rubato – flexible timing in which the performer slightly stretches or compresses the tempo for expressive effect.

This matters when a Western-trained violinist approaches Mushel.

The notes may be printed using familiar Western notation, but playing them exactly as one might play Brahms or Beethoven does not necessarily reveal their character. Uzbek rhythmic interpretation can involve subtle emphases and flexibility that notation alone cannot convey.

The performer sometimes has to read between the lines.

In the second movement of Mushel’s sonata, rhythmic patterns can be connected to traditional Uzbek structures, including those associated with Chambarcha Irok (a 5/4 rhythmic pattern (usul) associated with the Irok repertoire of Shashmaqom). They can be heard particularly clearly in the left hand of the piano part.

There are other clues.

The movement’s modal language helps create its distinctive Central Asian character. At another point, Mushel seems to evoke the sound of the dutar, the traditional Uzbek plucked string instrument.

For the violinist, this changes the physical approach to the instrument.

I find that playing the pizzicato – plucking the violin strings rather than using the bow – closer to the bridge gives the notes greater clarity and helps suggest the sharper articulation of a plucked traditional instrument.

These may seem like small performance decisions. But together they reveal something important.

Performing this repertoire requires understanding not only what Mushel wrote, but also the musical culture from which those sounds emerged.

More than borrowing

This is what makes the Uzbek violin repertoire so interesting to me.

It would be easy to describe it simply as a meeting between “East” and “West”, but that formulation is too simple. What happened in twentieth-century Uzbekistan was more complex.

Western instruments such as the violin entered an environment with its own sophisticated traditions of melody, rhythm, ornamentation and performance. Uzbek and Uzbekistan-based composers did not merely place folk material inside European forms. They increasingly adapted those forms to another musical sensibility.

For performers, that means technique cannot be separated from context.

A violinist can play every written note correctly and still miss the character of the music. Understanding the rhythmic logic of the doira, the articulation of the dutar, the expressive flexibility of Uzbek melody or the sound world of the gijak can fundamentally change how a passage is approached.

That was the lesson I had already begun to discover as a child, without yet having the vocabulary to explain it.

From Tashkent to Miami

Mushel’s sonata remains part of my repertoire today.

And so does Nazarov’s Song and Dance – the piece I remember opening as a child after that taxi ride with my mother more than three decades ago.

There is something beautifully circular about that memory.

Back then, my mother and I were riding through Tashkent towards my violin lesson at the Uspensky School. I was a child trying to understand why the violin music on my stand sounded somehow connected to the gijak I had just heard on the radio.

Read more on Novastan: From Q-pop to Hip-Hop: Kazakhstan’s Multilingual Sound

Today, I drive myself to teach at a conservatory in Miami.

And the question that began in that taxi has never completely left me.

Only now, instead of asking my mother why these musical worlds sound connected, I explore that question as a violinist, teacher and researcher – and introduce my own American students to the Uzbek music that first taught me to listen differently.

By Irina Antsiferova.

Irina Antsiferova is a violinist, educator and Doctor of Musical Arts. Her research examines the influence of Uzbek musical traditions on repertoire for Western string instruments. She is currently based in Miami.

The post How Uzbek Composers Made the Violin Their Own appeared first on Novastan English.

From Kazakh-Russian code-switching to French puns and Turkic-inspired typography, Kazakhstan’s musicians are turning multilingualism into a creative language of their own.

Imagine you’re at a concert in Almaty. The lights go down, the crowd falls quiet, and a singer steps up to the microphone. What comes next is not quite Kazakh, Russian or English, but a mixture of all three. The languages intertwine within the same line, sometimes even within the same word. The audience does not blink; if anything, it seems more engaged. The mixture is familiar because it reflects the way many people speak in everyday life. Kazakhstan’s multilingual reality gives musicians room for creative wordplay, while language choice can also signal artistic values, identities and worldviews. The examples below show some of the ways musicians bend, combine and reshape the languages around them.

A multilingual music scene

Kazakhstan has a layered linguistic history. Kazakh is the state language, while Russian remains widely spoken, in part as a legacy of Soviet-era language policies. English, meanwhile, has become increasingly visible among young, urban and globally connected Kazakhstanis. Turkish, Korean, Japanese and other languages also attract interest through the cultural products consumed by younger audiences. Debates over Kazakhstan’s planned transition from Cyrillic to a Latin-based Kazakh alphabet add another layer to this already complex linguistic environment.

Public debates about language can sometimes suggest a simple equation: one language, one script, one identity. Official language policy strongly promotes Kazakh and often emphasizes standard or “correct” usage. Yet local hip-hop, Q-pop and indie artists frequently disrupt these expectations. They switch between languages and scripts, insert slang and borrow sounds from elsewhere, turning linguistic mixture itself into a creative resource.

Global hip-hop, Kazakh references

In 2022, Irina Kairatovna, one of Kazakhstan’s most popular hip-hop groups, and rapper Shiza released the song ‘Kok tu’[1], which opens with these lines:

This kind of language mixing is common in Kazakhstani hip-hop, alongside English phrases and references drawn from global hip-hop culture. The lyrics also contain words such as ‘zhuz’ and ‘ru’, referring to forms of Kazakh tribal and clan affiliation. The result is both global and intensely local. Artists can signal familiarity with the traditions and conventions of international hip-hop while grounding their music in distinctly Kazakh social references, sounds and meanings.

Shiza is based in Shymkent, a southern Kazakhstani city where Kazakh is widely spoken. His lyrics are mainly in Kazakh, with occasional lines or words in Russian and English. Irina Kairatovna, by contrast, is based in Almaty and often uses separate verses in both Kazakh and Russian, alongside English words and phrases. This multilingual approach can also broaden an artist’s potential audience, including Russian-speaking listeners beyond Kazakhstan.

Ninety One and the politics of language

Ninety One, one of Kazakhstan’s best-known Q-pop groups, offers a different example. Q-pop draws inspiration from K-pop while developing a distinctly Kazakh-language pop culture. The group’s name refers to 1991, the year Kazakhstan gained independence, and the members have presented themselves through a strongly patriotic and decolonial frame while performing predominantly in Kazakh. They have played an important role in making Kazakh-language pop more visible to younger audiences. At the same time, they notably avoid Russian in their songs while freely experimenting with English and other languages.

Several of Ninety One’s songs turn this linguistic experimentation into wordplay. ‘Mooz’ and ‘Ah!Yah!Mah!’, for example, contain English sections or lines. The group also plays with similarities between Kazakh and languages such as English, French and Spanish. In ‘Mooz’, meaning ‘ice’, the spelling uses the English-looking ‘oo’ in place of the Kazakh letter ‘ú’. In ‘Ah!Yah!Mah!’, English-style exclamations echo the Kazakh word ‘ayama’, meaning ‘do not pity’. A similar play between Kazakh and French runs through ‘Jur mapelep’, whose title sounds like the French phrase ‘je m’appelle’. In ‘Senorita’, the artists combine Spanish phrases such as ‘Mi casa, su casa’ with the Kazakh word ‘bailandy’ (‘he or she became attached’), creating a phonetic echo of the Spanish ‘bailando’. These choices showcase the flexibility of Kazakh while also demonstrating the artists’ linguistic inventiveness and cosmopolitan references.

Playing with scripts and typography

Script and typography provide another field for experimentation. Against the backdrop of Kazakhstan’s long-running debate over a transition from Cyrillic to Latin script, some artists have also reimagined writing systems used in the region before the Soviet period. Irina Kairatovna, for example, used Cyrillic lettering designed to resemble Arabic script on the poster for the short film ‘Turning Over Thirty’. Rapper Yenlik has used Latin lettering with a similar visual reference to Arabic script on an album cover. Sary, a band working in the growing Q-rock (Qazaq rock) scene, uses a logo whose Latin lettering evokes Turkic runiform writing. Through typography, these artists connect contemporary popular culture with older layers of the region’s literary and cultural history.

Read more on Novastan: From Küi to Metallica: How Aldaspan Electrified the Kazakh Dombra

After 2022: new cultural directions

The balance between these languages is also changing. Whereas artists such as Irina Kairatovna have used Russian as part of a multilingual strategy that can reach audiences across the post-Soviet space, groups such as Ninety One focus more strongly on Kazakh-speaking listeners while also looking toward international, often English-speaking audiences. Demand for high-quality cultural products in Kazakh had already been growing, but Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine gave questions of language and national identity new urgency. Some Kazakhstan-born artists who had worked in Russia, including Skryptonite, M’Dee and Dequine, returned to Kazakhstan and publicly condemned the war. More broadly, parts of the local music scene have increasingly looked toward Western and Asian markets, and some artists have declined to perform in Russia.

Read more on Novastan: Central Asian rap in 10 tracks

International attention has followed. In 2026, hip-hop artist Yenlik appeared on COLORS, the German online music platform that has featured international stars including Billie Eilish, Drake and Doja Cat. The platform has more than eight million followers, and Yenlik’s performance attracted more than half a million views. In 2025, the British platform Dazed interviewed the Kazakhstani indie artist Samrattama. Actor Iain Armitage, known for the television series Young Sheldon, has also said online that Kazakh singer Ayau is among his favorite artists, bringing her additional international attention. Taken together, these examples point to a broader shift: Russia is no longer the only external cultural reference point for musicians from Kazakhstan, as Western and Asian platforms become increasingly important.

Russian still matters

Yet the growing symbolic importance of Kazakh does not mean Russian has disappeared from the music industry. Performing in Kazakh can signal patriotism and alignment with local cultural values, but Russian remains important in professional and commercial life. According to people working in the sector, contracts and financial arrangements with advertising companies are still often handled in Russian. In practice, working in the creative industries – and in urban professional life more generally – can still be difficult without it. It is therefore too early to speak of a complete ‘Kazakhization’ of the music scene. What is visible instead is a substantial, but uneven, linguistic shift.

Kazakhstan’s multilingual environment, combined with the coexistence of several scripts and writing traditions, gives musicians unusually rich material for linguistic experimentation. Artists use language choice, code-switching, script and typography to communicate values, identities and worldviews. There is a clear decolonial current and a growing body of high-quality music in Kazakh, but the picture is more complicated than a simple replacement of Russian by Kazakh. Russian remains significant, while English and other international languages are becoming increasingly prominent in the country’s music scene.

These examples capture only a fraction of the linguistic experimentation taking place in Kazakhstan’s music. Future pieces in this series will look at the rise of Qazaq rock, the country’s underground music scene, and the ways Russia’s war against Ukraine has reshaped the choices and horizons of local musicians.

Article by Merey Otan, PhD in Eurasian Studies, Nazarbayev University.

[1] ‘Kok tu’ translates from Kazakh as ‘blue flag’, referring to Kazakhstan’s national flag, which features a blue background, a golden sun and eagle, and traditional Kazakh ornamentation.

The post From Q-pop to Hip-Hop: Kazakhstan’s Multilingual Sound appeared first on Novastan English.

Clarinetist Sayyod Mirzomurodov and pianist Mariya Akhadjanova have released Contemporary Uzbek Music for Clarinet and Piano, the first commercial album devoted entirely to contemporary Uzbek repertoire for the two instruments. Issued by the British label Clarinet & Saxophone Classics, the 72-minute recording brings together nine works by six composers, all presented as world-premiere recordings.

The project combines established pieces with new works written specifically for Mirzomurodov. It grew out of his effort to document, expand and bring international attention to a repertoire that had often remained inaccessible beyond Uzbekistan because of the scarcity of published scores, professional recordings and international distribution.

In this interview with Novastan’s Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine, Mirzomurodov discusses his path from Surkhandarya to the United States, the influence of maqom and other Uzbek musical traditions on contemporary composition, his collaboration with Akhadjanova and the wider challenge of bringing Uzbek academic music to international audiences.

Novastan: Could you begin by telling us about your path as a clarinetist and your relationship with Uzbek classical music?

Sayyod Mirzomurodov: I was born and raised in O’zgarish, in the Sariosiyo district of Surkhandarya, in southern Uzbekistan. Music was present in my family from an early age. My father, Sultonmurod Saidov, was an artist and founded the Tajik band Parvin, which was known not only in Surkhandarya but also in Samarkand, Bukhara, Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

He was a perfectionist who expected a very high standard from himself. His seriousness towards artistic work had a lasting influence on me.

When I was in the fifth grade, I moved to Tashkent and entered the V. A. Uspensky Specialized Music School, where I began studying the clarinet. I later continued at the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan. My clarinet teacher, Bakhodir Salikhov, played an especially important role in my development.

Read more on Novastan: From Uzbekistan to Strasbourg: Aziz Shokhakimov, a conductor between cultures and languages

Another major influence was Timur Vyacheslavovich Mirzaev, the conductor of the student wind orchestra. His detailed and inspiring approach encouraged me to think beyond simply playing the correct notes and to understand the larger meaning, character and structure of the music.

In 2017, I moved to the United States to study with Amanda McCandless at the University of Northern Iowa, where I completed a Master of Music degree in clarinet performance. I later began a Doctor of Musical Arts programme at the University of Iowa, studying with Jorge Montilla and working as a teaching assistant.

Most of my early formal education was centred on the Western classical tradition. I played the standard European clarinet repertoire but did not yet have a deep understanding of the history and richness of Uzbek academic music.

As my career developed, especially after I left Uzbekistan, I became increasingly interested in my own cultural and musical roots. I began searching for works by Uzbek composers, speaking with composers directly, researching maqom and Uzbek musical history and presenting this repertoire in my recitals.

What began as a personal search eventually became a central part of my artistic work and a responsibility that I felt towards this repertoire.

How did the idea for an album devoted entirely to Uzbek clarinet music emerge?

The idea first came to me when I was an undergraduate at the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan. Even then, I understood that the main problem was not necessarily an absence of repertoire. Much of the repertoire was simply insufficiently documented, professionally recorded, published or made available internationally.

When I began my doctoral studies at the University of Iowa, I learned that I could complete a major creative recording project as part of my doctoral work. I immediately knew that I wanted to record Uzbek music.

Initially, I imagined documenting several existing works. But I also wanted the project to stimulate the creation of new repertoire. I first approached Nurali Erkaev and explained my idea to him. He responded enthusiastically and wrote Sonata-Fantaziya for me.

Through that collaboration, I developed connections with other composers. Sherzod Sobirov wrote his Fantasy, Farrukh Akramov composed his Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, and Mustafo Bafoyev wrote Buxorcha. All four works were dedicated to me. Bafoyev later wrote another piece for me, Ston Serdtsa – Cry of the Heart – which will be included on my next album.

What began as a smaller doctoral recording project eventually expanded into a 72-minute album containing nine works by six composers.

I realised there was enough material for a complete album when I saw how the new commissions could be placed alongside important existing works, including Anvar Ergashev’s Eastern Capriccio, Mustafo Bafoyev’s Clarinet Concerto and lyrical pieces representing other dimensions of the Uzbek school of composition.

The album is therefore not simply a collection of unrelated works. It presents several generations, forms and artistic directions, including fantasy, sonata, song-poem, poem-ballad, lyrical miniature, capriccio and concerto.

Together, these pieces demonstrate that Uzbek clarinet music already possesses considerable artistic depth and diversity, even though none of them had previously been commercially recorded.

Who are the composers represented on the album?

The album includes six composers from different generations and artistic directions within Uzbek professional music.

Mustafo Bafoyev is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary Uzbek music. His catalogue includes symphonic, chamber, operatic, ballet and stage music. His works combine Uzbek and Tajik intonational traditions with a sophisticated contemporary language.

Four of his works appear on the album, making him a central figure in the programme. They reveal different periods and dimensions of his music, from the early lyricism of Lirik Hikoya to the large-scale Clarinet Concerto and the newly composed Buxorcha.

Habibulla Rahimov is an established composer and educator with extensive experience writing for wind instruments. His music has been performed in Uzbekistan, elsewhere in Central Asia and internationally. His Poema-ballada represents one of the album’s more abstract and experimental sound worlds.

Anvar Ergashev was one of Uzbekistan’s most influential composers, as well as an accomplished pianist and conductor. His music is distinguished by vivid imagery, theatrical energy, rich instrumental colour and strong emotional intensity. He combined European classical forms with Eastern melodic and rhythmic traditions in a highly individual manner.

His Eastern Capriccio, written for the clarinetist Bakhodir Salikhov, is probably the most frequently performed Uzbek clarinet work represented on the album. It combines virtuosity, lyricism, improvisatory freedom and a strong theatrical character.

Nurali Erkaev is a composer, scholar and educator whose work combines serious academic research with creative imagination. His Sonata-Fantaziya brings together maqom-inspired phrasing, contemporary harmony, rhythmic transformation and the dramatic freedom of the fantasy genre.

Farrukh Akramov represents a younger generation of Uzbek composers connected with international contemporary-music festivals and masterclasses. His music combines modal lyricism and carefully developed musical ideas with modern harmony and texture.

Sherzod Sobirov is a composer and educator whose work includes chamber music, orchestration and music for traditional Uzbek instruments. His Fantasy has strong rhythmic energy, lyrical contrast and a contemporary treatment of Uzbek musical colour.

Together, these composers show that Uzbek academic music cannot be reduced to a single style. The album connects established senior figures with younger composers who are continuing and transforming the tradition in their own ways.

Is there something recognisably Uzbek about music written for Western instruments such as the clarinet and piano?

Yes, although it is not always a matter of hearing a direct quotation from a traditional melody. In many of these works, the Uzbek character is expressed through melodic behaviour, ornamentation, modal colour, rhythm, flexibility of phrasing and the relationship between instrumental music and the human voice.

Maqom and shashmaqom are especially important sources. Their influence can be heard in characteristic modal patterns, melodic turns, ornamental figures, rhythmic organisation and the gradual development of a musical line. Certain passages use modal inflections resembling a Phrygian colour, as well as augmented seconds and other intervals associated with Eastern melodic expression. Traditional rhythmic cycles, or usul, also influence contemporary works, sometimes through irregular or changing metres.

Another important quality is nola: an emotionally charged melodic sigh or cry. In Uzbek music, a line is often expected to breathe, bend, ornament and intensify almost as a singer would. The clarinet is particularly suited to this language because its sound can be very close to the human voice. It can move from an intimate, almost whispered tone to intense expression, laughter-like brightness or virtuosic energy.

Bafoyev’s Buxorcha, for example, draws on the musical world of Bukhara and on intonations related to mavrigi, shashmaqom and local song-and-dance traditions. The clarinet takes on a vocal and ornamented role, while the piano provides a flexible harmonic and rhythmic framework and participates actively in the musical dialogue. Together, the two instruments move between reflective lyricism and energetic, dance-like motion.

Sobirov’s Fantasy uses a Phrygian-flavoured sound world, song-like melodic lines, rapid changes of character and dance-like rhythmic energy. Erkaev’s Sonata-Fantaziya places maqom-inspired phrasing and rhythmic patterns within a contemporary harmonic framework.

Ergashev’s Eastern Capriccio uses augmented seconds, chromatic figuration, ornamentation, changing metres and rhythmic freedom to create an improvisatory character.

The music is therefore recognisably Uzbek not because every work imitates traditional music, but because the composers have absorbed its way of breathing, shaping melody, creating rhythm and expressing emotion.

How did the encounter between European classical forms and local traditions shape Uzbek composition?

The development of Uzbek academic music during the twentieth century involved a complex encounter between two musical systems.

Uzbekistan already possessed highly developed traditions such as maqom, shashmaqom, folk song, regional dance music and the ustoz-shogird teacher-student system, through which music was passed from one generation to another through listening, imitation, direct practice and close personal instruction.

During the Soviet period, Western systems of notation, harmony, counterpoint, formal design, orchestration and conservatory education became institutionalised.

This encounter transformed both traditions. Uzbek composers began using Western forms such as the sonata, concerto, symphony, opera, ballet and chamber ensemble while drawing on local modes, melodic gestures, rhythms, poetry and instrumental colours.

The move towards notation and institutional education was also important. Figures such as Yunus Rajabiy helped preserve and notate maqom repertoire, allowing later composers and conservatory-trained performers to study this material and reinterpret it for modern instruments.

Earlier composers such as Mutal Burhanov, Sulaymon Yudakov, Tolibjon Sadikov and Mansur Mansurov helped establish the foundations of Soviet-era Uzbek academic music. Later composers, including Felix Yanov-Yanovsky, developed increasingly individual and sophisticated musical languages.

Since independence, the interaction between national tradition and contemporary composition has continued, but it has become more stylistically diverse.

Some composers remain close to maqom, folk melody and recognisable regional traditions. Others use abstraction, dissonance, experimental textures or international contemporary techniques while retaining subtler elements of Uzbek musical thinking.

Contemporary Uzbek academic music is therefore not simply Western music with Eastern decoration. It is the result of more than a century of creative interaction between different systems of musical thought.

How did you locate the music, and what was it like to work directly with the composers?

The process was based largely on personal research and direct contact with composers, their families and performers connected with the repertoire.

None of the nine works on the album had previously been commercially recorded, although some, especially Ergashev’s Eastern Capriccio, already had a performance history.

Most of the scores were not available through international publishers or standard music catalogues. Many were sent to me directly by the composers or obtained during the collaborative process.

Eastern Capriccio requires a special explanation. Although the work circulated among clarinetists and appeared in certain collections, it had never been formally issued by a commercial publisher and could not be purchased through a regular catalogue.

I obtained the musical material from Anvar Ergashev’s widow, Namuna Ergasheva, who holds the copyright. I also consulted my former conservatory professor Bakhodir Salikhov, for whom the work was composed and to whom it was dedicated.

Bafoyev’s Clarinet Concerto had an orchestral performance available online, but there was no commercial recording and no known recording of the piano reduction used on the album.

For the newly commissioned works, the process was much more collaborative. The composers sent initial versions from Uzbekistan, and I played through the clarinet parts in the United States.

I then shared observations about register, breathing, articulation, technical difficulty, balance with the piano and which passages felt natural or less effective on the instrument. The composers revised the scores, and gradually polished versions emerged.

The artistic voice remained entirely the composer’s. My role was to contribute the practical and expressive perspective of the performer and to help the composer use the clarinet as effectively as possible.

During a meeting with Nurali Erkaev in Tashkent in the summer of 2024, we discussed Sonata-Fantaziya in detail, including its musical character, phrasing, harmony, form and the relationship between the clarinet and piano. This direct discussion had an important effect on the way I interpreted the work.

Four of the newly written pieces were premiered during my doctoral recital in March 2025 with Mariya Akhadjanova. Performing them before the recording allowed us to understand what worked in a live setting and continue refining our interpretation.

For me, this was one of the most meaningful aspects of the project. I was not only preserving repertoire from the past. I was participating in the creation of repertoire that had not previously existed.

How did your collaboration with pianist Mariya Akhadjanova shape the recording?

My collaboration with Mariya began while we were studying at the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan. We performed together frequently in concerts, masterclasses and special events in Tashkent.

She was the natural and ideal partner for this project. She is an outstanding pianist and collaborative musician, with a beautiful sound, refined technique, musical intelligence and the ability to understand both the large structure of a work and its smallest expressive details.

I was also fortunate that she was studying at the University of Iowa. Being at the same institution allowed us to rehearse regularly, return repeatedly to difficult passages and work over a long period rather than preparing the album in only a few concentrated meetings.

Mariya is from Uzbekistan and studied at the State Conservatory before continuing her education at the University of Northern Iowa and beginning her doctorate at the University of Iowa. She therefore has a deep understanding of both Uzbek musical traditions and Western classical performance practice.

That shared cultural background was important because many stylistic details are difficult to explain through words or notation alone. We often understood naturally how a phrase should breathe, where the music needed flexibility, how an ornament should be shaped or when a rhythm should feel more like speech or dance.

At the same time, we did not assume that cultural familiarity alone was sufficient. We studied the scores carefully, researched the composers, discussed the structure and character of every section and tested different balances, articulations, tempos and colours.

We also wanted to avoid treating the piano as a secondary accompaniment. In many of these works, the piano creates the rhythmic environment, dramatic tension, harmonic colour and orchestral scale. The clarinet and piano function as equal partners in a dialogue.

The album was recorded in December 2025 in the Concert Hall of the Voxman Music Building at the University of Iowa. Our aim was to respect the Uzbek character of the works while presenting them at a high professional chamber-music standard.

Why has Uzbek classical music remained relatively unknown internationally?

There are several interconnected reasons.

The first is access. Many scores by Uzbek composers are not distributed by major international publishers. A musician outside Uzbekistan may not know that a work exists, may not know where to obtain it or may need a personal connection with the composer, the composer’s family or another musician.

The second problem is the lack of professional recordings. A score is important, but notation alone cannot fully communicate all the stylistic details of Uzbek music.

A performer unfamiliar with the tradition may read the correct notes but still miss the national intonation, ornamentation, flexibility of phrase, rhythmic freedom or an expression such as nola. Recordings provide an essential interpretive reference.

Another reason is that Uzbek music abroad is often represented mainly through folk or traditional genres. Those traditions are extremely important, but they do not represent the country’s entire musical culture.

The contemporary academic layer – sonatas, concertos, chamber works, operas, ballets and symphonic works – is much less visible.

There have also been limited systems for publishing, professional recording, rights management, promotion and international distribution. An important work may be performed at a concert in Uzbekistan and then disappear from public access because the performance is not professionally documented or distributed.

Programming habits are another factor. International performers and institutions naturally return to established repertoire that already has scores, recordings, teaching traditions and audience recognition. It is much more difficult for unknown music to enter that cycle.

The album has already begun to change this situation. For the first time, all nine works exist together in a professionally produced commercial recording, released by the British specialist label Clarinet & Saxophone Classics and available internationally.

I am also collaborating with a publishing company, the composers and the relevant rights holders to prepare official editions of the scores. The recordings are already accessible internationally, and the scores are being prepared for publication so that the repertoire will also become officially and practically available to performers around the world.

Which works and composers would you recommend to listeners who want to explore Uzbek academic music further?

For a clarinetist beginning to explore this repertoire, I would recommend Anvar Ergashev’s Eastern Capriccio. It is virtuosic, colourful and theatrical, and is perhaps the most established Uzbek clarinet work internationally.

I would also recommend Nurali Erkaev’s Sonata-Fantaziya. It presents a particularly strong synthesis of Uzbek-inspired intonation, contemporary harmony, formal development, rhythmic energy and expressive freedom. It has a clear national character without depending on direct quotation, and gives both the clarinetist and pianist substantial artistic roles.

Bafoyev’s Buxorcha offers a strong connection to the musical traditions of Bukhara, while his Clarinet Concerto demonstrates the larger symphonic possibilities of Uzbek clarinet writing. Akramov’s Sonata and Sobirov’s Fantasy show two contrasting contemporary approaches.

Beyond the album, I would encourage listeners to explore composers such as Felix and Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, Mirsodiq Tojiev, Ikrom Akbarov and Rustambek Abdullaev, as well as other composers whose work has shaped modern Uzbek academic music.

Uzbekistan is becoming increasingly connected internationally. Are you seeing a similar opening in its classical-music scene?

Yes, I believe there are clear signs of greater international openness. This process is already taking place through composers, performers, universities, festivals, recordings and digital communication.

Uzbek composers are increasingly participating in international festivals, masterclasses, research conferences and contemporary-music programmes. Farrukh Akramov’s music, for example, has been presented in the United States, Europe, Asia and other former Soviet countries. Sherzod Sobirov’s works have also been performed internationally.

Nurali Erkaev is another important example. He combines composition, scholarship and education, and his work is rooted in serious study of Uzbek orchestration and national musical identity while also using a contemporary language that can communicate internationally.

My collaboration with him demonstrates how these connections can develop. He wrote Sonata-Fantaziya for me in Uzbekistan while I was studying and performing in the United States. I premiered the work, discussed it with him directly in Tashkent, performed it at Carnegie Hall and at universities and concert venues, and then recorded it commercially for an international label.

Performers and students from Uzbekistan are also studying abroad and creating connections between institutions and musical communities. Digital platforms make it possible for composers and performers to exchange scores and recordings almost immediately, even when they live on different continents.

The release of this album by a British label is another concrete example of this opening. It has placed works by six Uzbek composers in an international commercial recording catalogue and made them available to listeners, libraries, educators, researchers and performers in different countries.

What would success for this project ultimately mean to you?

For me, this project is already a success.

It is the first commercial album devoted entirely to contemporary Uzbek music for clarinet and piano. The fact that these nine works now exist together in a professionally produced and internationally available recording is already a major artistic and cultural achievement.

They can be heard internationally, studied by musicians and researchers and used as interpretive references by performers who previously had no practical way of encountering this repertoire.

I am deeply grateful to Victoria Samek and her team at Clarinet & Saxophone Classics for believing in the project and helping bring it to completion. Their experience and commitment gave this repertoire a professional international platform.

The effect is also visible in live performance. After concerts, students, professors, clarinetists and other musicians regularly approach me to ask about the composers, recordings and scores.

Musicians are already studying the repertoire, requesting the music and beginning to perform it themselves. The album is therefore not simply being heard as a finished recording. It is generating further musical activity.

Even before the recording was completed, I saw an example of this effect. After I premiered several of the new works, another performer contacted one of the composers to learn more about a piece and discuss the possibility of commissioning another work. This showed that the repertoire had already begun creating new artistic connections.

The official publication of the scores is the next stage. I am working with the composers, rights holders and a publishing company so that musicians around the world can obtain and perform the complete repertoire represented on the album.

The project has demonstrated that contemporary Uzbek academic music can stand on an international stage not simply as a cultural curiosity, but as substantial, expressive and artistically valuable chamber music.

For people from Uzbekistan and Central Asia living abroad, the album can create a connection to culture, memory and the feeling of home. For listeners with no previous connection to Uzbekistan, it opens a musical world they may never have encountered before.

Contemporary Uzbek Music for Clarinet and Piano is available through Clarinet & Saxophone Classics.

Interview by Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan English.

The post When the clarinet speaks Uzbek: bringing an overlooked classical repertoire to the world appeared first on Novastan English.

Linguist and court-certified translator Mahabat Sadyrbek recently published an English-language textbook on Kyrgyz grammar, helping make the language more accessible to international learners. Novastan spoke with her about what teaching Kyrgyz reveals about the language itself – from multilingual slang and regional varieties to culturally untranslatable words, artificial intelligence and the enduring power of the mother tongue.

Kyrgyz remains comparatively difficult for English-speaking learners to study, with far fewer teaching materials available than for many more widely taught languages. Mahabat Sadyrbek’s Kyrgyz grammar textbook in English therefore represents not only a practical learning resource, but also an effort to explain the internal logic and cultural richness of the language to a wider international audience.

Building on this work, Novastan asked her how Kyrgyz is changing today, what its words reveal about Kyrgyz society, and what the language needs in order to flourish in the digital age.

Mathieu Lemoine, Novastan: When you hear young people speaking Kyrgyz in Bishkek today, what sounds completely different from the Kyrgyz spoken by their parents or grandparents? Could you give us some concrete examples?

Mahabat Sadyrbek: The most noticeable difference is not necessarily grammar, but rhythm, vocabulary and the degree of code-switching. Many young people in Bishkek move effortlessly between Kyrgyz, Russian and, increasingly, English.

A sentence may have a Kyrgyz grammatical structure while incorporating Russian or English words. One might hear expressions such as мен аны блоктоп салдым – “I blocked him” – or мага скрин кылып жиберчи – “Send me a screenshot.”

What fascinates me as a linguist is how naturally Kyrgyz adapts these borrowed words. A word like “block” becomes the Kyrgyz verb блоктоо, which can then take all the usual Kyrgyz grammatical endings. This illustrates the remarkable flexibility of the language.

Many young speakers also use expressions such as кринж – “cringe”, токсик – “toxic”, вайб – “vibe”, гешталт – “gestalt” – and контент – “content”. Most of these entered Kyrgyz through Russian-language social media, although they ultimately originate in different languages, most commonly English.

The language of my parents and grandparents sounded quite different. Older speakers tended to use more proverbs, indirect expressions and culturally rich vocabulary. When describing a respected person, for example, they might use words and expressions such as даанышман, эки сүйлөбөгөн, элге-журтка жугумдуу or сөзү өтүмдүү.

Эки сүйлөбөгөн literally describes someone who “does not speak twice”: a person who keeps their word. Элге-журтка жугумдуу refers to someone who is well liked and respected within the community, while сөзү өтүмдүү describes a person whose words carry weight. Each expression highlights a different aspect of wisdom, integrity, social respect or moral character.

For me, this is not simply a story of decline. Languages naturally evolve. The important question is whether new linguistic layers enrich Kyrgyz while preserving its own expressive traditions.

Which Kyrgyz words or expressions are becoming less common today, and what is being lost with them?

I would be cautious about saying that words are disappearing completely. Many traditional expressions are still actively used, especially outside the largest cities. However, some are gradually moving from everyday speech into passive vocabulary.

Words such as нарк, ызаат, кут, жөрөлгө, энчи and ашар represent far more than dictionary definitions. They express cultural concepts that have developed over centuries and remain deeply rooted in Kyrgyz culture.

Take нарк, for example. It refers not only to values or norms, but also to inherited standards of dignity, honour, moral worth and proper conduct.

Likewise, ызаат goes beyond simple respect. It encompasses respectful conduct, courtesy, consideration and appropriate behaviour towards others.

Кут can be described as a life-giving blessing associated with harmony, dignity and well-being. Жөрөлгө refers to a custom, traditional observance or ritual. Энчи describes an inherited portion or personal share traditionally assigned to someone, while ашар is the practice of voluntary collective community work.

These concepts reflect cultural values that cannot easily be reduced to single English words.

Kyrgyz kinship terminology provides another example. The language distinguishes relatives with remarkable precision, reflecting social roles and obligations that are often lost when these terms are replaced by broader Russian words.

Traditional proverbs are also becoming less common among younger speakers. Earlier generations often expressed criticism or advice indirectly through proverbial language, allowing sensitive ideas to be communicated tactfully and without confrontation. As this tradition weakens, communication may become more direct, but it also loses some of its subtlety.

The loss, therefore, is not merely lexical. It concerns cultural memory and ways of understanding social relationships that have shaped Kyrgyz society for generations.

Are there new Kyrgyz words, slang expressions or ways of speaking that you particularly like? Where do they come from?

One expression I particularly like is Жашоо керемет – “Life is wonderful.” It has become especially popular among younger generations. I appreciate its simplicity and optimism. To me, it expresses an outlook on life that encourages gratitude and resilience, even in difficult times.

More generally, what I admire most is the linguistic creativity of young Kyrgyz speakers. Rather than simply borrowing international words, they adapt them to Kyrgyz grammar and make them their own.

Kyrgyz is an agglutinative language with a highly productive grammatical system that allows borrowed words to be integrated almost effortlessly into native word formation. For example, лайк becomes лайктоо – “to like” – while блок becomes блоктоо – “to block.”

One can naturally say лайктап койчу – “Please give it a like” – or аны блоктодум – “I blocked him.” Although the vocabulary may be international, the grammatical structure remains unmistakably Kyrgyz.

I also welcome the increasing use of native terminology such as санарип – “digital”, санариптешүү – “digitalisation” – and жасалма интеллект – “artificial intelligence.” These examples show that Kyrgyz is fully capable of creating its own terminology for new technologies and contemporary life.

Borrowing has always been part of the history of Kyrgyz. Over the centuries, the language has absorbed vocabulary from Arabic, Persian, Mongolian and Russian. What matters is not whether words are borrowed, but whether Kyrgyz remains a language in which people can discuss every aspect of modern life with confidence.

How different can Kyrgyz sound from one region to another? Are there words, pronunciations or expressions that immediately reveal where a speaker comes from?

One of the things I find most fascinating about Kyrgyz is its remarkable regional diversity.

Even the name of a simple household item can vary considerably. A washing basin, for example, may be called дагара, тазик, таштек, чылапчын or илеген, depending on the region. Such differences often allow Kyrgyz speakers to identify someone’s regional background almost immediately.

Pronunciation and intonation differ as well. The speech of Naryn is often regarded as particularly clear and conservative, while speakers from Issyk-Kul, Talas and Osh each have characteristic rhythms and local vocabulary that many Kyrgyz immediately recognise.

The broadest distinction is traditionally made between northern and southern varieties. Standard literary Kyrgyz is largely based on northern speech, whereas southern varieties have developed under stronger historical contact with Uzbek and Tajik.

Today, however, regional identity is becoming increasingly fluid. Internal migration, especially to Bishkek, has brought together speakers from every part of the country. As a result, urban Kyrgyz often blends regional features with Russian influence and the language of social media.

A person’s speech may therefore reveal not only where they grew up, but also where they studied, where they worked and the communities with which they identify.

Is there a Kyrgyz word or expression that says something important about Kyrgyz culture but becomes flat or inaccurate when translated into Russian or English?

One of my favourite examples is кут. It is often translated as “blessing”, “good fortune”, “grace”, “luck” or “prosperity”, yet none of these English words fully captures its meaning.

In Kyrgyz culture, кут is far more than luck or material prosperity. It refers to a life-giving force that brings harmony, dignity, abundance and spiritual well-being to a person, a family or even a place.

It cannot be bought, earned through wealth or measured in material terms. Rather, it represents an inner quality that gives life balance, purpose and meaning.

The concept is deeply woven into everyday life and language. Kyrgyz people commonly say кут болсун or куттуу болсун to mark almost every important life event: a birthday, moving into a new home, a wedding, the purchase of a new car, a new job or any significant new beginning.

Although these expressions are often translated simply as “Congratulations”, they convey something much richer. They express the wish that this new stage of life will be accompanied by кут – that it will bring not only success, but also harmony, well-being and lasting fulfilment.

Its deeper significance becomes especially clear in the expression үйдүн куту. Literal translations such as “the blessing of the house” or “the luck of the house” fail to convey what the phrase truly expresses.

It refers to the person whose presence fills a home with warmth, stability and emotional strength. Traditionally, this expression is most often associated with a woman, particularly a mother or grandmother, although it can equally describe anyone whose character, wisdom and care hold a family together.

I find кут especially fascinating because it illustrates how a single word can preserve an entire worldview. Embedded within it are ideas about family, spirituality, human relationships and social harmony that require several sentences to explain in English.

It also reminds us that translation is rarely a matter of replacing one word with another. Sometimes, it means translating an entire culture.

When Kyrgyz speakers mix Kyrgyz and Russian in the same sentence, is this simply natural bilingual speech, or can it gradually change the structure and vocabulary of Kyrgyz itself?

Both are true.

For millions of people in Kyrgyzstan, switching between Kyrgyz and Russian is a natural part of everyday communication. Bilingual speakers often alternate between the two languages depending on the topic, the people they are speaking with or the social setting.

This kind of code-switching is common in multilingual societies and should not automatically be viewed as a problem.

At the same time, long-term bilingualism can gradually reshape a language. Borrowing vocabulary is a normal part of linguistic development, and Kyrgyz has incorporated words from Arabic, Persian, Mongolian and Russian throughout its history.

The more important question is whether Kyrgyz remains capable of expressing every aspect of modern life.

If fields such as law, medicine, science or information technology continue to function primarily in Russian, speakers may gradually lose the habit of discussing these subjects in Kyrgyz. Russian influence may also extend beyond vocabulary, affecting sentence structure, idiomatic usage and habitual ways of expression.

Rather than portraying this as a competition between two languages, I see it as a question of balance. Russian remains an important language of education, science and international communication for many Kyrgyz citizens.

The challenge is to ensure that Kyrgyz develops alongside it rather than beneath it. This requires investment in education, terminology, literature, media and digital technologies, including artificial intelligence.

A confident language is not one that fears outside influence. It is one that can absorb new ideas while preserving its own identity and expressive richness.

Where is the most inventive Kyrgyz being produced today: literature, rap, comedy, cinema, social media, television or everyday conversation?

If I had to choose just one place, I would say social media without hesitation.

It is where Kyrgyz evolves most rapidly and where new words and expressions can spread almost overnight. Young people experiment with humour, irony, memes and wordplay in ways that would have been unimaginable only a generation ago.

Many of these innovations disappear as quickly as they emerge, while others quietly become part of everyday speech. Creativity, however, is by no means confined to social media. Every medium contributes something different to the language.

Contemporary music, especially rap, has introduced new urban vocabulary and fresh ways of talking about identity, migration, relationships and social change.

Comedians capture the richness of spoken Kyrgyz through regional accents, code-switching and everyday situations that audiences instantly recognise.

Literature serves a different purpose. It preserves depth, nuance and stylistic richness, allowing writers to explore the emotional and philosophical possibilities of Kyrgyz in ways that fast-moving digital communication rarely can.

Cinema occupies a unique place because it brings all these layers together. A good film lets us hear authentic conversations, regional varieties, humour, silence and emotion within the same story. In many ways, it reflects how people actually speak more faithfully than formal television or official media.

What excites me most is that Kyrgyz is no longer confined to traditional domains. Today, it thrives in podcasts, YouTube channels, stand-up comedy, rap, independent films and online discussions.

To me, this diversity is one of the clearest signs of a healthy language. A language stays alive when every generation reshapes it while remaining connected to those who came before.

Which contemporary Kyrgyz writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers, comedians or online creators should foreigners discover if they want to hear the language as it is alive today?

Like any living language, Kyrgyz is shaped by many voices, genres and regional traditions. Anyone who wants to experience Kyrgyz as it is spoken today should explore a wide range of cultural forms rather than searching for a single representative figure.

In cinema, I would recommend starting with two filmmakers whose work reflects different dimensions of contemporary Kyrgyz culture.

Read more on Novastan: Cinéma kirghiz : Black Red Yellow, une histoire d’amour contrarié

Aktan Arym Kubat is internationally recognised for his poetic and deeply human films, which capture the rhythm of everyday life, the emotional richness of spoken Kyrgyz and the relationship between people, tradition and landscape.

Ruslan Akun, by contrast, represents a younger generation of filmmakers whose work has reached wide audiences both in Kyrgyzstan and abroad. His films offer an accessible introduction to contemporary Kyrgyz society while presenting the language in a natural, everyday setting.

Anyone interested in contemporary spoken Kyrgyz should also explore today’s music scene, especially rap. Artists such as Begish, Bayastan and Ulukmanapo demonstrate how the language continues to evolve through music.

Their lyrics blend traditional linguistic resources with contemporary vocabulary, global influences and the realities of modern urban life.

At the same time, I would encourage listeners not to overlook Kyrgyz oral traditions. Hearing a skilled manaschy, a performer of the Epic of Manas, reveals another dimension of the language: its rhythm, imagery, formulaic expressions and extraordinary narrative power.

Although this tradition is centuries old, it remains a vibrant part of Kyrgyz culture.

I would also encourage people to explore Kyrgyz-language podcasts, YouTube channels and independent online creators. They often reflect everyday speech more naturally than formal media.

Read more on Novastan: Manas and the Making of Kyrgyzstan

One YouTube channel I would especially recommend is Tilimpoz, as well as Nakta Podcast. They explain the meanings, origins and cultural nuances of Kyrgyz words and expressions in an engaging and accessible way.

To understand a language, it is not enough to read its literature or study its grammar. You also need to hear people telling stories, making jokes, arguing, singing and creating. That is where a living language reveals itself most fully.

Can Kyrgyz currently speak convincingly about artificial intelligence, medicine, law, sexuality, psychology and other modern subjects, or do speakers often have to switch to Russian or English?

The question is less whether Kyrgyz can express modern concepts than whether speakers have access to the linguistic resources needed to use it confidently in specialised domains.

Like many languages that are expanding their role in education, research and technology, Kyrgyz is still developing consistent terminology in fields such as artificial intelligence, medicine, law and psychology.

Legal, medical and technical concepts are not always standardised, and many professionals continue to use Russian terminology because that is the language in which they received their education. Switching to Russian is therefore often a matter of habit rather than necessity.

Artificial intelligence presents both a challenge and an opportunity. What Kyrgyz needs is not only new terminology but also high-quality digital resources: comprehensive dictionaries, terminology databases, language corpora, spell-checkers, speech-recognition tools, machine translation and AI systems trained on reliable Kyrgyz-language data.

Without such infrastructure, the language risks becoming less visible in the digital world.

At the same time, I am optimistic. Kyrgyz has a remarkably productive grammatical system that enables it to create new vocabulary while preserving its own linguistic identity.

Throughout its history, it has successfully adapted to changing cultural, political and technological realities. There is every reason to believe it can do the same in the age of artificial intelligence.

Ultimately, the future of Kyrgyz will not be determined by the number of borrowed words it contains. It will depend on whether its use continues to expand across education, research, technology, public administration and scientific communication.

A language remains strong when it is able to serve every sphere of life, from everyday conversations to academic research and technological innovation.

What is one sentence in Kyrgyz that you find especially beautiful, powerful or revealing about the language? Could you write it in Kyrgyz and explain what it means?

There is one sentence I return to again and again. I often recite it at the end of my public talks because, more than any other, it expresses how I feel about my native language:

«Бул менин өлбөс, өчпөс, көөнөрбөс эне тилим.»

A close English rendering would be:

“This is my immortal, unfading and timeless mother tongue.”

Yet no translation can fully convey the emotional depth of the original. The three adjectives өлбөс, өчпөс and көөнөрбөс are closely related, but each contributes its own shade of meaning.

Together, they express the idea of a language that endures across generations. It does not disappear, it does not lose its vitality, and it never ceases to matter.

For me, these words are far more than a poetic expression. They reflect my relationship with the Kyrgyz language and much of what has shaped my academic work.

As a linguist and a court-certified translator, I have come to see language not simply as a tool of communication, but as a living repository of history, memory, values and ways of understanding the world that cannot always be carried across into another language.

Languages naturally evolve. They borrow words, develop new forms of expression and adapt to changing realities. That is not a sign of weakness, but of vitality.

As long as people continue to speak, learn, create, question and dream in Kyrgyz, the language will continue to grow while remaining true to itself.

That is why I always return to these words:

«Бул менин өлбөс, өчпөс, көөнөрбөс эне тилим.»

Interview conducted and edited by Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief of Novastan English.

The post A Language in Motion: Mahabat Sadyrbek on Teaching Kyrgyz to the English-Speaking World appeared first on Novastan English.

When Nurzhan Toishy first heard Metallica in the late 1980s, he recognised something unexpected in the riffs: the rhythmic language of the Kazakh dombra. More than two decades later, that intuition gave birth to Aldaspan, a band that replaced electric guitars with electric dombras. What began as a musical experiment also became part of a wider debate over tradition, modernity and the place of Kazakh culture in contemporary music.

In 1988, Nurzhan Toishy was listening to Metallica when the opening of Motorbreath caught his attention.

To many listeners in the late Soviet Union, the aggressive riffs and speed of American thrash metal represented a musical world far removed from traditional Central Asia. To Toishy, however, something about it sounded strangely familiar.

“I recognised in the first riffs a manner of playing characteristic of the dombra,” the founder and producer of the Kazakh band Aldaspan told Novastan.

It was an observation that would stay with him for decades.

Metal and dombra music, he says, had effectively been playing alongside each other in his head since childhood. But it took around twenty years before he had the money, time and musicians capable of turning the idea into something tangible.

The result was Aldaspan: a rock project built not around the electric guitar but around electrified versions of Kazakhstan’s emblematic two-stringed instrument.

Its premise might sound like a novelty. In practice, however, Toishy argues that the musical distance between the Kazakh steppe and heavy metal is considerably shorter than it appears.

How the Kazakh dombra became a metal instrument

To understand his argument, Toishy says listeners should first hear the dombra without distortion, amplifiers or drums.

The dombra is a long-necked, two-stringed plucked instrument at the centre of Kazakh musical culture. One of its most important traditions is the küi: an instrumental composition which can communicate stories, historical memory and emotion without sung lyrics.

UNESCO inscribed the traditional art of dombra küi on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2014, describing it as a practice that connects communities to their historical roots and helps transmit Kazakh cultural knowledge between generations.

Within that tradition, two broad performance styles are usually distinguished: tökpe and shertpe. The distinction is more complex than simply “fast” and “slow”, although that is how Toishy initially explains it to an unfamiliar listener.

Tökpe, historically associated particularly with western Kazakhstan, tends towards a more forceful and expansive style, often involving rapid movement across the strings. Shertpe, strongly associated with central and eastern Kazakhstan, places greater emphasis on individual plucking, melodic nuance and lyricism. Ethnomusicological research describes tökpe as characteristically rapid and broad in scope, while shertpe tends towards greater subtlety and expressive variation.

For Toishy, the connection with rock becomes particularly apparent in the faster tökpe küi tradition. He recommends first listening to traditional tökpe küi performances – including the pieces collected in this playlist – and only then returning to Metallica’s Motorbreath.

By contrast, Seken Turysbek’s well-known Köñil Tolqyny is an example of the slower, more lyrical shertpe küi tradition. Toishy mentions it to illustrate the stylistic range of dombra music rather than as a direct comparison with Motorbreath.

“If you listen to what I have mentioned, you will understand how obvious these things are yourself,” he says.

Aldaspan later explored the two traditions in different releases. Toishy points in particular to Elge Qait and Tokpe Light. The band’s own discography describes the 2012 Elge Qait as a collection primarily of slow shertpe küi.

For him, then, putting the dombra into heavy rock was less an attempt to force two incompatible genres together than to amplify a connection he believed was already there.

Six strings, but no guitars

Aldaspan’s crucial decision was not simply to place a traditional instrument over a conventional rock arrangement.

There would be no electric guitar.

The project instead developed around lead, rhythm and bass electric dombras. Its original formation paired three variants of the instrument with drums; the band’s debut album Attila, released in 2011, mixed ethno-rock and thrash metal with throat singing. Aldaspan’s current official history dates the fully formed concept to 2009, when Toishy began pursuing the idea of running the sound of the dombra through overdrive and distortion.

For a musician, electrification presented an obvious problem.

The attraction of the dombra lies precisely in the distinctive character of its sound. If amplification and distortion simply made it imitate an electric guitar, the experiment would lose much of its purpose.

“That was what I feared most – that the sound of the dombra would become the sound of a guitar,” Toishy says.

His conclusion after experimenting was that the distinctive timbre survived.

In his own estimation, around “90 percent” remained recognisably dombra, while perhaps “10 percent” acquired a metal character. The numbers are subjective, of course, but they capture the balance he was seeking: power without erasing identity.

Even Toishy says he did not initially know exactly what kind of ensemble would emerge once overdrive and distortion were applied to the instruments. Only after recording, mixing and listening back to several albums did he feel that Aldaspan had created not simply one sound but several variations of ethno-rock.

Among the works he considers particularly important in that evolution are El Dastan, Uly Kosh, tracks from Attila, and the albums Tokpe Light and Elge Qait.

There is also a striking economy to the band’s basic setup.

“Across our whole group, there are six strings,” Toishy says of the three two-stringed dombras.

The apparent simplicity is precisely what surprises audiences, he says. A small traditional instrument associated by many with acoustic performance can suddenly produce the density and physical impact expected from a rock band.

Toishy believes another quality differentiates the instrument from the guitar.

“The dombra is close to the timbre of a man’s voice,” he says. “When it plays, physiologically its sound is closer to the human voice than a guitar is.”

He is careful to present that as a personal perception rather than a scientific claim.

“How dare you ruin such an instrument?”

If rock audiences were intrigued, some guardians of musical tradition were considerably less enthusiastic.

Toishy remembers the first reactions of Kazakh audiences as a kind of astonishment: how could such a small instrument make so much noise – and so many different kinds of noise?

“Even now at our concerts, people genuinely feel the impact of the live performance and don’t believe their eyes,” he says.

Rock listeners, he recalls, were particularly won over by the band’s first album Attila and the solo in the track Edige.

But some traditional musicians from an older generation saw the experiment very differently.

Their response, Toishy remembers, was essentially: “How dare you ruin such an instrument?”

One conservatory teacher, he says, even suggested that people should be put in prison for what they were doing to the dombra.

The anecdote is humorous in retrospect, but the disagreement underneath it is significant.

Aldaspan touches on a question that extends far beyond one Kazakh rock band: what does it mean to preserve a traditional instrument?

Is preservation primarily about maintaining established forms of performance? Or can radically changing the environment in which an instrument is played also help keep it culturally alive?

The dombra is not a marginal object in Kazakhstan. It is one of the country’s most visible cultural symbols. Since 2018, Kazakhstan has even celebrated National Dombra Day on the first Sunday of July.

That symbolic weight makes experimentation more sensitive. An electric dombra is not merely a new piece of musical equipment: for some listeners it interferes with an object tied to ideas of heritage, history and Kazakh identity.

Yet traditional dombra culture itself is hardly static. Different regions developed different instruments, techniques and schools, while contemporary performers continue to adapt their instruments to new stages and performance environments.

Aldaspan pushes that process considerably further – but Toishy’s concern about preserving the dombra’s timbre shows that the band does not understand modernisation simply as replacing the traditional sound with a Western one.

The point, for him, is to make the dombra capable of entering another musical space without ceasing to sound like itself.

Rediscovering what was already there

Toishy also sees the reception of Aldaspan as part of a broader change in how Kazakhstan relates to its own cultural inheritance.

“What changed was people’s awareness and a reassessment of what we Kazakhs have as an ethnic group,” he says.

The internet played an important role in that process, in his view.

Greater exposure to music and culture from around the world could have weakened interest in local traditions. Toishy believes the opposite happened as well: comparison allowed Kazakhs to hear their own musical heritage differently.

“Kazakhs, through comparison, discovered the beauty of their own instruments and compositions,” he says.

He sees the result as part of a wider cultural revival, accompanied by renewed public interest in Kazakh and Turkic history.

That observation has a visible contemporary context. Traditional instruments now coexist in Kazakhstan with rock, electronic music, world music and other hybrid forms. Almaty’s Spirit of Tengri festival, held since 2013, has developed into a major platform for contemporary ethnic and world music, bringing together performers who combine inherited musical traditions with global genres. Its 2026 edition again presented ethno-fusion and contemporary ethnic music to a large open-air audience.

Aldaspan nevertheless occupies an unusually uncompromising position within this landscape.

Rather than adding a dombra as a marker of local colour to an otherwise familiar rock sound, it asks the instrument itself to do the work normally performed by the guitar.

The resulting music becomes an argument of sorts: modernity does not necessarily require abandoning the traditional instrument.

Warriors, memory and the imagined steppe

History is as important to Aldaspan’s identity as musical technique.

Asked which historical figure most inspires him, Toishy refuses to choose one.

Instead he invokes a collection of personalities and traditions – among them the eighth-century Turkic prince Kül Tegin, Genghis Khan, commanders and warriors – that together form what he describes as a wider Turkic warrior culture.

Some of his broader historical claims go well beyond scholarly consensus, and are best understood as part of his personal interpretation of Eurasian history rather than statements of established fact.

But that worldview helps explain Aldaspan’s artistic universe.

The band is interested not only in how old music can sound through modern equipment, but in whether contemporary Kazakh popular culture can use older histories, heroes and narratives as raw material of its own.

Toishy says the Kazakh language and Kazakh musical traditions remain among the strongest elements shaping the band’s identity.

Actively combining them with contemporary genres, he believes, creates something that cannot simply be replicated elsewhere.

It is a form of cultural confidence that differs from preservation behind glass. The past becomes material to be rearranged, amplified – and distorted.

From an American dream to European festivals

For years, Toishy’s imagined destination for the band lay across the Atlantic.

“As a child I dreamed of stages in the United States,” he says.

He eventually spent six years living there. The experience changed his ambition.

Today, he wants Aldaspan to reach European rock festivals.

Toishy believes European audiences are more receptive to unusual combinations of musical cultures and genres. It is explicitly his own judgement – and one he jokingly acknowledges Americans may dislike – but he now sees Europe rather than the United States as Aldaspan’s most promising international audience.

There is something fitting about that ambition.

Aldaspan is a deeply Kazakh project created partly through encounters with music from elsewhere. Its origin story begins with a teenager in Soviet Kazakhstan hearing an American metal band and unexpectedly recognising the dombra inside it.

Nearly four decades later, Toishy still seems fascinated by the same possibility: that listeners who believe they are hearing two completely separate musical worlds may discover that the boundary between them is less obvious than expected.

For newcomers, he suggests starting with three Aldaspan tracks: Edige from Attila, El Dastan from Uly Kosh, and Turk Kultegin from Balqadisha.

Listen to those, then to an acoustic küi. Then perhaps go back to Motorbreath.

That is the comparison Toishy has been asking people to make since 1988.

And whether or not every listener hears exactly what he hears, Aldaspan has already demonstrated something else: an instrument does not have to remain sonically unchanged to carry a tradition forward.

Sometimes two strings, an amplifier and a distortion pedal are enough to make the steppe sound unexpectedly contemporary.

By Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English, based on an interview with Nurzhan Toishy.

The post From Küi to Metallica: How Aldaspan Electrified the Kazakh Dombra appeared first on Novastan English.

In Queens, a few words can contain the history of an entire community. A guest may be welcomed with xush omaded, an expression immediately recognisable to Tajik speakers. At the table may be osh, the regional rice dish better known internationally as plov, while grandparents move between Bukhori and Russian and their grandchildren answer in English.

The scene belongs unmistakably to New York. Its vocabulary, food and social rhythms, however, lead back to Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent and Dushanbe.

Read more on Novastan: How Central Asia became home for the Koryo-Saram

Over the final decades of the Soviet Union and the turbulent years that followed its collapse, most Bukharan Jews left Central Asia. Large communities developed abroad, most visibly in the New York neighbourhoods of Forest Hills and Rego Park. Others took root in Vienna, Toronto and a number of smaller centres. The result is an unusual geographical reversal: a culture bearing the name of Bukhara now has some of its most dynamic institutions thousands of kilometres away from the city itself.

Novastan has previously explored the debated origins of the Jewish presence in Central Asia and the historical importance of Bukhara and Khwarezm. The contemporary story begins where those histories leave off. How does a community remain Bukharan after leaving Bukhara? And what links do Bukharan Jews still maintain with the Central Asian societies from which they emerged?

A community whose centre moved

Despite their name, Bukharan Jews did not come exclusively from Bukhara. Communities developed across the territories that today constitute Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, with important centres in Samarkand, Tashkent, Kokand, the Ferghana Valley and Dushanbe. “Bukharan” gradually became a collective designation for a wider Central Asian Jewish civilisation shaped by Persian-speaking urban culture, Jewish religious traditions and long interaction with Uzbek, Tajik and other neighbouring populations.

Migration began well before the Soviet collapse, but accelerated dramatically from the 1970s onwards. By the 1990s, the economic uncertainty accompanying independence, the weakening of Soviet-era professional and social structures, and the opportunity to reunite with relatives abroad encouraged much of the remaining population to depart.

The community did not simply disperse. In several cities, Bukharan Jews recreated dense networks of synagogues, schools, businesses, newspapers, restaurants, cultural organisations and family associations. Queens became the most visible North American example: a place where Central Asian food, music and communal life remained present not only inside private homes, but in streets, shops, banquet halls and religious institutions.

Bukhara had not been reproduced exactly. The new community was increasingly American, urban and outward-looking. Yet it retained practices and relationships that distinguished it from both the surrounding population and other Jewish communities.

Bukhori: a Central Asian language abroad

Perhaps no element expresses this complicated identity better than Bukhori, also called Bukharian or Judeo-Tajik.

Bukhori belongs to the Iranian family of languages. It is closely related to Tajik and, more distantly, to modern Persian. It developed among the Jewish communities of Central Asia, incorporating Hebrew and Aramaic terms associated with religion and communal life, while also absorbing vocabulary and influences from Uzbek and, during the Soviet period, Russian.

To a Tajik speaker, much of Bukhori may sound familiar. Words connected with everyday life, hospitality and family reflect a shared Persian linguistic environment. But religious vocabulary, pronunciation, expressions and the historical experience carried by the language make it distinct.

Read more on Novastan: Les Juifs de Boukhara : comment sont-ils arrivés en Asie centrale ?

Everyday Bukhori contains many words immediately recognisable to Tajik and Persian speakers. A guest may hear xush omaded, “welcome,” while osh evokes both the wider Central Asian rice tradition and specifically Bukharan Jewish dishes such as oshi sabo. Such vocabulary reflects the community’s roots in a Persian-speaking Central Asian environment. Its specifically Jewish dimension is more apparent in religious terminology derived from Hebrew and Aramaic, although the precise vocabulary and pronunciation vary between speakers and communities.

Bukhori’s alphabets tell another story. It was traditionally written in Hebrew characters. Soviet language reforms subsequently introduced Latin and then Cyrillic scripts. Today, the language may appear in Hebrew, Cyrillic or adapted Latin spelling, depending on the speaker, country and intended readership.

Each script points towards a different cultural horizon: Hebrew towards Jewish religious and literary life, Cyrillic towards the Soviet experience, and Latin increasingly towards younger generations living in English-speaking countries. The lack of a single universally accepted contemporary spelling system also complicates efforts to teach the language.

Bukhori remains spoken, particularly among older and middle-aged members of the community. But it is considered endangered. Migration has strengthened Bukharan communal identity in some respects while weakening the transmission of its traditional language. In Queens, children may grow up surrounded by Bukharan food, weddings, religious institutions and family networks without becoming fluent Bukhori speakers. Russian may remain the language used with parents and grandparents, while English dominates education, work and friendships.

This produces one of the central paradoxes of the modern diaspora: Bukharan identity may be surviving more successfully than Bukhori.

Language loss does not automatically mean the disappearance of the community. A person can identify strongly as Bukharan through family, religion, food, music and social relationships. Yet language carries forms of humour, intimacy and memory that are difficult to reproduce through translation. When grandparents speak Bukhori but grandchildren understand only fragments, more than vocabulary is lost. A particular way of describing Central Asian Jewish life begins to recede.

The question is therefore not simply whether Bukhori will survive. It is also what being Bukharan will mean if it does not.

Queens: a new Bukhara?

Forest Hills and Rego Park are sometimes described as a “new Bukhara.” The expression is evocative, but incomplete.

Queens did not preserve Bukharan culture in a frozen form. It transformed it. Religious practices changed in contact with other Jewish traditions. Businesses adapted to the opportunities and demands of New York. Young people combined family expectations with American education and professional life. Community institutions became more formalised, visible and politically engaged.

Nevertheless, the density of Bukharan life remains remarkable. Synagogues and schools coexist with restaurants, food shops, newspapers, wedding halls and social organisations. Weddings and religious celebrations bring together extended families and reinforce connections that can also support professional advancement, philanthropy and mutual assistance.

The community’s economic visibility has sometimes encouraged outsiders to describe Bukharan Jews principally through wealth or influence. Such language requires caution. It can reproduce old stereotypes about Jews, money and hidden power while obscuring the ordinary work through which immigrant communities build stability.

The more interesting story is institutional. Bukharan Jews in Queens developed strong family and community networks, created businesses, funded religious and cultural organisations and became active in local civic life. Their prominence is less a mystery than the result of geographic concentration, entrepreneurship, mutual support and sustained investment in communal institutions.

Elements of Central Asian social organisation also travelled with them. Family reputation, obligations between relatives, elaborate hospitality and neighbourhood-based mutual assistance recall aspects of the mahalla, the local community structure found across Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. These practices have inevitably changed in New York, but they have not disappeared.

Queens is therefore not a replica of Bukhara. It is a new diaspora city in which selected elements of Central Asian life have been reorganised to meet American conditions.

Vienna: a Central Asian Jewish crossroads

Vienna offers a different version of the Bukharan Jewish journey.

The Austrian capital became an important transit point for Jews leaving the Soviet Union during the 1970s. Many continued towards other destinations, but some Bukharan Jewish families remained. Over time, they created one of the most substantial and active Bukharan communities in Europe.

The city now contains Bukharan synagogues, religious and social organisations, businesses and cultural initiatives. Bukhori and Russian continue to be used among parts of the community, while German increasingly dominates among younger generations. Research on Bukharan Jews in Vienna describes a community shaped simultaneously by Central Asian origins, Soviet migration, Jewish religious life and integration into a German-speaking European city.

Vienna’s experience resembles Queens in some respects, but differs in scale and urban setting. Its community is smaller and exists within a European Jewish landscape marked by its own historical sensitivities. It also remains geographically closer to the former Soviet world, potentially facilitating travel and continued personal connections.

Here too, language is an indicator of generational change. Older residents may move between Bukhori and Russian. Their children and grandchildren increasingly use German. The community remains visible, but the balance between religious affiliation, family heritage and specifically Central Asian culture is continually renegotiated.

Toronto: preserving culture through organisation

Toronto represents a third model.

Its Bukharan Jewish population is smaller and less geographically concentrated than that of Queens. The Jewish Bukharian Community of Toronto was formally established in 2003, building on earlier efforts to bring together families dispersed across the Greater Toronto Area. Cultural preservation was explicitly presented as part of its mission.

A smaller community cannot rely on neighbourhood concentration alone. Maintaining cultural life requires deliberate organisation: religious services, family gatherings, youth programmes, celebrations and spaces in which people can meet others with the same background.

This may make cultural preservation simultaneously more fragile and more conscious. In Queens, Bukharan identity can be reinforced through daily proximity. In Toronto, it may depend more heavily on people choosing to participate.

This is not a contradiction. It is the normal result of a history marked by migration, coercion and adaptation.

Vienna and Toronto therefore broaden the story beyond a simple journey from Uzbekistan to New York. They show that there is no single Bukharan diaspora experience. The survival of language and culture depends on community size, urban geography, religious institutions, migration history and the language of the surrounding society.

Is Central Asia still a homeland?

For the first generation of migrants, Uzbekistan or Tajikistan may remain associated with childhood, education, neighbours and professional life. For their descendants, Central Asia is more likely to be encountered through family stories, food, music, photographs and occasional journeys.

Diaspora visits to Bukhara and Samarkand often include former homes, synagogues, schools and cemeteries. These are not always journeys towards a place of possible return. They are journeys towards evidence: proof that the family history described by parents and grandparents belonged to real streets and neighbourhoods.

Read more on Novastan: Khwarezm et Boukhara, deux foyers anciens des Juifs d’Asie centrale

This raises a subtle distinction. Central Asia can remain emotionally important without functioning as a contemporary homeland. Bukhara may be remembered as a place of coexistence, hospitality and belonging, even when the family’s departure was driven by uncertainty or the conviction that its future lay elsewhere.

The process can also idealise the past. Nostalgic accounts may emphasise close relationships with Muslim neighbours and minimise discrimination, political restrictions or the difficulties of late Soviet and post-Soviet life. Other families may remember exclusion and see departure as liberation rather than loss.

There is no single Bukharan Jewish memory of Central Asia. The diaspora contains different generations, migration routes and political experiences.

A living community or a heritage landscape?

Jewish life has not completely disappeared from Uzbekistan. Synagogues and small communities remain, including in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara. But the demographic contrast is striking: the historic centres now contain only a fraction of the population found in diaspora cities.

This creates a risk that Jewish life in Central Asia becomes treated principally as heritage.

The old Jewish quarter of Bukhara, its synagogues, cemeteries and traditional houses attract visitors and preservation initiatives. The city’s Jewish houses form part of Bukhara’s distinctive architectural landscape, although many have changed ownership or function. Some have become guesthouses, workshops or tourism businesses.

Preservation is necessary, but it raises difficult questions. Who determines how the history of a departed community is presented? Do restored buildings communicate the complexity of Jewish life, or merely provide an attractive setting for tourism? What remains of a neighbourhood when its architecture survives but most of its former inhabitants live abroad?

The remaining Jewish residents should not be reduced to guardians of monuments. Their lives, concerns and choices are part of the contemporary story. Their relationship with the diaspora may include family contacts, religious support, philanthropy and visitors, but it may also contain differences of perspective. Those who stayed did not experience the same transformation as those who rebuilt their lives abroad.

Uzbekistan rediscovers its diaspora

The relationship is not maintained only through private memory. Uzbekistan has increasingly engaged Bukharan Jewish communities abroad as part of its cultural diplomacy.

Official and academic initiatives have highlighted the historical contribution of Jews to Central Asian society. A major conference on Bukharan Jewish heritage was held at Samarkand State University in September 2025. In February 2026, another conference examined the role of Bukharan Jews in the region’s socioeconomic and cultural life, including diaspora investment, tourism and educational exchange.

For Uzbekistan, the diaspora offers several potential advantages. Bukharan Jews can promote the country as a tourist destination, support heritage projects, facilitate business contacts and reinforce an international narrative of religious coexistence.

For the diaspora, official recognition may validate a history that was sometimes marginalised. It may also create opportunities to protect cemeteries, synagogues and family heritage.

But the relationship should not be romanticised. State-sponsored celebration of Jewish history can serve contemporary political objectives. It allows Uzbekistan to present itself internationally as tolerant, open and connected to a successful global diaspora. The decisive question is whether this engagement also supports the remaining local community and permits complex discussion of the past.

Bukharan Jews may be approached as former citizens, cultural ambassadors, investors, tourists or intermediaries. They may see themselves in all of these roles – or reject some of them.

Can Bukhara survive outside Bukhara?

The Bukharan Jews remain a meaningful community. Their institutions are active, their family and religious networks are visible, and their cultural traditions continue to distinguish them across several countries.

But what is being preserved is changing.

Bukhori is weakening even where Bukharan identity remains strong. Central Asia is becoming, for many younger members of the diaspora, an inherited landscape rather than a lived one. Cuisine, weddings and family solidarity may survive more easily than language. Religious identity may grow stronger even as specifically Central Asian knowledge recedes.

The Bukharan Jewish story is therefore not simply one of disappearance or successful preservation. It is a story of selection. Every generation decides, consciously or otherwise, which elements of Bukhara to carry forward.

In Queens, Vienna and Toronto, the answer is still being negotiated – between Bukhori and English, Russian and German, memory and modernity, inherited obligations and individual choices.

Most Bukharan Jews no longer live in Central Asia. Yet they remain one of Central Asia’s most distinctive communities abroad. Their global journey has not ended their relationship with the region. It has transformed Bukhara from a place into a language, a family memory, a social world – and a question passed from one generation to the next.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post From Bukhara to Queens: The Global Journey of the Bukharan Jews appeared first on Novastan English.

In Tashkent’s Seoul Garden, a train marked “1937” runs across the background of a bronze memorial. In the foreground, a Korean family arrives with children and bundles. An Uzbek elder extends a hand of welcome.

The monument, erected for the 80th anniversary of the resettlement of Koreans to Uzbekistan, carries inscriptions in Uzbek, Korean and Russian. It thanks the Uzbek people for their warmth and kindness toward the Korean diaspora. The scene compresses the Koryo-Saram story into a single image: forced movement, uncertainty, survival and the later memory of Central Asia as both a place of exile and a place of refuge.

Read more on Novastan: « Nous sommes plus Russes que Coréens » : biographie d’une Coréenne au Kazakhstan

The Koryo-Saram are often described as the Korean diaspora of Central Asia. The phrase is accurate, but incomplete. Their history begins in Korea, passes through the Russian Far East, is violently reshaped by Stalinist deportation, and continues in the cities, collective farms, theaters, newspapers, kitchens and families of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

For many Koryo-Saram, Central Asia is not only the place to which their ancestors were sent. It has become home.

From Korea to the Russian Far East

The ancestors of the Koryo-Saram began moving from Korea to the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century. Some were fleeing poverty, famine or social instability. Others crossed into the Russian Far East in search of land and security. Later, Japanese colonial domination of Korea added another layer to this movement.

In the Russian Far East, Korean communities took root. They farmed, built villages, created schools and organized cultural life. After the 1917 revolution, they became part of the Soviet Union’s complex nationality system, developing a distinct Soviet Korean identity.

The name Koryo-Saram can be roughly understood as “Korean people,” with “Koryo” referring to an older name associated with Korea. By the 1930s, Soviet Koreans had become a visible community in the Far East. But their position near the border with Korea and Manchuria, at a time of growing tension with imperial Japan, made them vulnerable to suspicion. Soviet authorities increasingly viewed them through a security lens, despite the fact that most had no connection to Japanese power.

In 1937, that suspicion became mass punishment.

The train to Central Asia

In the autumn of 1937, Soviet Koreans were forcibly deported from the Russian Far East to Central Asia. Around 172,000 people were moved, mainly to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Families were loaded onto trains and sent thousands of kilometers away from the region where many had lived for generations.

The deportation was not an orderly transfer of population. For those who lived through it, it began not with policy language, but with a knock at the door. Families were told to gather what they could carry and leave. Most had no clear idea where the trains were going.

The journey across the Soviet Union could last weeks, in crowded wagons where people slept, cooked and relieved themselves in the same confined space. Children, elderly people and the sick were the first to die. Others arrived in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan weakened by hunger, cold and disease, only to be placed in barracks, warehouses or unfinished settlements.

Read more on Novastan: Qu’est-ce qu’être un Coréen au Kazakhstan aujourd’hui ?

In official documents, this was “resettlement.” In family memory, it was something else: the moment an entire people was torn from one landscape and forced to begin again in another.

The deportation of the Koreans was one of the earliest Soviet deportations of an entire ethnic group. It prefigured later mass deportations of Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Ingush, Volga Germans and others under Stalin. But unlike some of those cases, the Korean deportation remains less widely known outside specialist circles.

The official justification was security. In practice, it meant the removal of an entire population from a borderland because of their ethnicity and because of the geopolitical anxieties of the Soviet state.

Yet the deportation did not erase them. In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Koryo-Saram rebuilt.

Survival in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

Central Asia was not an empty stage on which the Koryo-Saram simply appeared. It was already a complex region of Kazakh, Uzbek, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Russian, Tatar, Ukrainian, Jewish, German and other communities. The arrival of deported Koreans added another layer to the Soviet remaking of the region.

Koryo-Saram families adapted quickly, often under harsh conditions. Many became associated with agriculture, including rice cultivation and vegetable production. Korean collective farms became known in parts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Over time, Koryo-Saram also entered education, science, engineering, medicine, administration, culture and trade.

Their integration was shaped by Soviet structures. Russian became the main language of public life and, increasingly, of many Korean families. Soviet education opened pathways into professional careers. At the same time, the trauma of deportation and the pressure of assimilation weakened the transmission of Korean language and customs.

The result was not simple disappearance. Instead, a new identity emerged: Korean by ancestry, Soviet by experience, Russian-speaking in daily life, and Central Asian by geography, memory and belonging.

This hybridity is central to the Koryo-Saram story. They did not remain a sealed diaspora, separate from the societies around them. Nor did they fully dissolve into the Soviet majority. They became one of the many communities through which Central Asia’s multiethnic reality was lived.

A culture of adaptation

The most visible traces of Koryo-Saram culture are often everyday ones: food, family names, markets, holiday tables, memories of grandparents, and stories told about deportation.

Food is especially important because it shows how identity can survive through adaptation. In the Russian Far East, Korean cuisine had already been shaped by migration. In Central Asia, ingredients and conditions changed again. Dishes were adjusted to what was available.

The most famous example is morkovcha, the carrot salad now known across the former Soviet Union as “Korean carrot.” Made with carrots, garlic, coriander, vinegar and oil, it is not traditional Korean food in the narrow sense. It is a Soviet Korean invention, born from displacement and improvisation. Like the Koryo-Saram themselves, it belongs to more than one world.

Other dishes, such as kuksi and pigodi, also carry family memories. Yet for many younger Koryo-Saram, food may be one of the few remaining links to an older cultural world. A person may no longer speak Korean or Koryo-mar, but still recognize certain dishes as part of home.

This partial inheritance can be intimate and painful. It reminds younger generations that something was preserved, but also that much was broken by deportation, Soviet assimilation and decades of linguistic change.

Language, memory and silence

Language is one of the most sensitive parts of the Koryo-Saram story. Older generations preserved varieties of Korean, often referred to as Koryo-mar. But over the Soviet decades, Russian became dominant for many families. In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, younger Koryo-Saram often grew up speaking Russian as their first language, while also navigating Kazakh, Uzbek or other local languages depending on their environment.

For some, this language shift is experienced as loss. For others, it is simply part of the reality of being Koryo-Saram. Identity is not always carried through fluent language. It may be carried through food, surnames, family stories, photographs, rituals, or the memory of an old village in the Russian Far East that descendants have never seen.

The Soviet period also shaped what could be said publicly. Like many deported peoples, Koryo-Saram families often lived with memories that were painful, fragmented or only partly transmitted. Grandparents might speak of the train journey, the first winters, the hunger, or the difficulty of beginning again. But the political meaning of deportation could remain difficult to discuss openly.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became easier to revisit these histories. Yet memory remains uneven. Some younger Koryo-Saram know the story of 1937 in detail. Others know only fragments. Some feel a strong desire to reconnect with Korean language and culture. Others feel that their identity is primarily Central Asian or post-Soviet.

This is not a contradiction. It is the normal result of a history marked by migration, coercion and adaptation.

For younger Koryo-Saram, reconnecting with Korean roots is often a search through fragments. In many families, the language has faded. What remains may be a surname, old photographs, a family story about deportation, or a few dishes prepared at home.

This makes contemporary reconnection with Korea both meaningful and complicated. South Korea may represent ancestry, opportunity and cultural pride, but also distance. The Korean Wave, language classes or migration to Seoul do not simply restore a lost identity. They reveal how much that identity was transformed in Central Asia.

For many Koryo-Saram, the question is not whether they are Korean or Central Asian, but how to live with an inheritance made of both memory and absence.

Institutions of memory

Koryo-Saram culture was never only domestic. Institutions mattered too.

One of the most important is the Korean Theater of Kazakhstan. Founded in Vladivostok in 1932, it was relocated after the deportation and eventually became a major cultural institution in Kazakhstan. Its survival tells a larger story: a community uprooted by force continued to produce art, performance and collective memory in a new land.

The newspaper Koryo Ilbo also became a key institution for Soviet Koreans in Kazakhstan. Together with theaters, associations and cultural circles, it helped maintain a public Koryo-Saram identity even as language use shifted and generations became increasingly Russian-speaking.

These institutions complicate any simplistic narrative of loss. Deportation was devastating, but it also generated new forms of cultural production. Koryo-Saram identity did not remain frozen in the past. It was remade in Almaty, Tashkent, Kyzylorda and other Central Asian spaces.

The Koryo-Saram story also reaches far beyond the communities usually associated with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Viktor Tsoi, the legendary frontman of Kino and one of the defining voices of late Soviet rock, had Koryo-Saram roots through his father, whose family came from Kyzylorda in Kazakhstan after the 1937 deportation. Tsoi himself was born in Leningrad, and his public image was shaped above all by the Soviet rock scene of the 1980s. Yet his family history also linked him to the deported Korean communities of Central Asia.

Read more on Novastan: « Igla » : plongée dans le Kazakhstan sombre de la perestroïka avec le mythique Viktor Tsoï

Others left their mark in sport, art, scholarship and popular culture: Olympic gymnast Nellie Kim, historian German Kim, playwright and filmmaker Lavrenti Son, designer Jenia Kim, singer Anita Tsoy and Uzbekistani painter Nikolai Shin all point, in different ways, to the breadth of Soviet Korean experience.

Their lives show that the Koryo-Saram story is not only one of victimhood or preservation, but also of cultural production, mobility and influence across the post-Soviet world.

Tashkent’s Korean traces

In Uzbekistan, the Koryo-Saram story is not only preserved in official histories or family memories. It also appears in the quieter figures of urban life.

In 2023, our media partner Gazeta.uz profiled Yuri Kim, a second-hand bookseller in Tashkent known to customers and fellow sellers as “Uncle Yura.” The article presented him as a guardian of printed heritage, the owner of a large book collection and a familiar presence in the city’s book culture.

His story offers another way of seeing the Koryo-Saram place in Uzbekistan. Beyond the collective farms, deportation records and demographic categories, there are individual lives woven into the everyday fabric of Tashkent: booksellers, teachers, engineers, doctors, artists and neighbors. Through figures like Kim, the history of a deported community becomes part of the city’s cultural memory.

That memory is also visible in Seoul Garden. Its gate, pavilion, bell and memorial create a deliberately Korean space in the Uzbek capital. Yet the story they tell is not simply one of return to Korean tradition. It is a story of transplantation, rupture and reconstruction.

The memorial’s inscription thanking the Uzbek people reflects a common way in which the history is remembered in Uzbekistan: the deportation itself was a Soviet act of violence, but the local population is remembered as having helped the deportees survive and rebuild.

This narrative of gratitude should not obscure the brutality of 1937. But it helps explain why many Koryo-Saram families came to see Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan not only as places of exile, but also as places where life became possible again.

After 1991: new borders, old identities

The end of the Soviet Union changed the Koryo-Saram world again. Communities that had once lived within a single Soviet space suddenly found themselves divided between Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Ukraine and other newly independent states. New national languages, citizenship regimes and economic realities reshaped daily life.

For some Koryo-Saram, the post-Soviet period brought emigration. Russia, South Korea, Europe and North America became destinations. South Korea, in particular, acquired new importance. It was no longer only an ancestral reference point, but also a place of study, work, migration and cultural imagination.

Yet the relationship with South Korea can be complicated. Koryo-Saram may be ethnically Korean, but many do not speak standard Korean. Their food, history and family memories were shaped in the Soviet Union and Central Asia, not on the Korean Peninsula. In South Korea, some discover that they are seen as foreigners despite their Korean ancestry.

This creates one of the central paradoxes of Koryo-Saram identity: the ancestral homeland can feel foreign, while Central Asia, the land of deportation, can feel like home.

The global popularity of Korean culture has added another layer. K-pop, Korean dramas and South Korean soft power have made Korea more visible among young people across Central Asia. But Koryo-Saram history is not the same as the Korean Wave. It is older, more painful and more deeply embedded in the Soviet and Central Asian past.

For younger Koryo-Saram, this can produce a complex self-understanding. They may be proud of Korean ancestry, attached to Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, Russian-speaking in daily life, curious about Seoul, and conscious of a deportation history that does not fit neatly into national narratives.

From deportation to partnership

Today’s relationship between South Korea and Central Asia is visible far beyond monuments. Korean universities recruit students from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Korean dramas and pop culture circulate widely. South Korean companies are present in energy, automobiles, technology and infrastructure. In Tashkent, even a sign for KOGAS, the Korea Gas Corporation, outside Seoul Garden hints at a larger transformation.

In 1937, Koreans arrived in Central Asia in forced trains, uncertain whether they would survive the journey. Nearly 90 years later, South Korea has become one of Uzbekistan’s important Asian partners. Between those two moments lies the story of the Koryo-Saram: a community transformed from victims of forced displacement into an integral part of Central Asian society and, increasingly, a bridge between two regions that history once separated.

This bridge should not be romanticized. The Koryo-Saram are not simply intermediaries between Seoul and Tashkent, or between Korean capital and Central Asian markets. They are a community with their own history, losses and forms of belonging. Their experience cannot be reduced to diplomacy, business or soft power.

But their story does reveal something important about Central Asia itself.

The region is too often described through empires, borders, energy routes or great power competition. It is also a region made by movement: voluntary migration, forced deportation, labor mobility, exile and return.

Koryo-Saram history belongs to this larger story. It reminds us that Central Asia was not only the homeland of Turkic and Persian-speaking peoples, nor only the destination of Russian settlers. It was also a place where deported communities were forced to rebuild their lives, sometimes under terrible conditions, and where new forms of belonging emerged over time.

In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Koryo-Saram are not simply a remnant of Soviet nationality policy. They are part of the social and cultural fabric of the region. Their story can be found in theaters, newspapers, apartment blocks, family kitchens, markets and cemeteries. It is present in the popularity of Korean salads, but also in quieter memories of trains, collective farms and grandparents who started again in a land they had not chosen.

To call Central Asia home after deportation is not to erase the violence of 1937. It is to recognize the strength of those who survived it, and the generations who turned exile into belonging.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post How Central Asia became home for the Koryo-Saram appeared first on Novastan English.

Uzbekistan’s first World Cup appearance is often told through the players who carried the national team there: Eldor Shomurodov, Abbosbek Fayzullaev, Abdukodir Khusanov, Oston Urunov and the rest of a generation that made Uzbek football visible far beyond Central Asia. But national teams do not emerge from nowhere. They are built from clubs, cities, stadiums, academies, rivalries and local football cultures.

Over the past three decades, Uzbekistan’s domestic game has developed through several different models. There are old Soviet-era institutions, post-independence regional powers, prestige projects, industrial clubs, state-company teams, academy-driven structures and smaller provincial sides that rarely dominate the headlines but help give the league its geography. Together, they form the football map behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup dream.

The most famous point on that map is still Pakhtakor Tashkent. No club carries more symbolic weight in Uzbek football. Its name evokes cotton, Soviet Uzbekistan, the capital and one of the deepest tragedies in the country’s sporting memory: the 1979 air disaster that killed the team. Pakhtakor is not only a club with trophies. It is a national institution, a vessel of memory and the historic reference point against which other Uzbek clubs have often measured themselves.

If Pakhtakor is memory, Nasaf Qarshi is one of the clearest examples of regional achievement. Based in Kashkadarya, away from the capital and the Fergana Valley, Nasaf showed that a club outside Tashkent could build patiently, compete seriously and win internationally. Its 2011 AFC Cup victory remains one of the most important achievements in Uzbek club football. Nasaf’s story matters because it is not built around glamour. It is built around structure, continuity and the idea that a regional club can become more than a local project.

Navbahor Namangan represents something different again: popular passion. In the Fergana Valley, football is not only a sport but a form of civic identity. Navbahor’s name, meaning “spring”, gives the club a softer and more poetic image than many of its rivals, but its supporter culture is intense. Namangan’s Markaziy Stadium has become one of the emotional centres of Uzbek football, and Navbahor’s fan base has helped make the club a symbol of regional pride. If Uzbek football has a popular heartland, much of it beats in the Valley.

Also read on Novastan: Uzbekistan at the World Cup: The White Wolves Enter the Global Stage

Neftchi Fergana adds another layer to that same geography. Where Navbahor expresses Namangan’s football passion, Neftchi represents Fergana’s industrial memory. Founded as Neftyanik and linked to the oil-refining world of Fergana, the club dominated the early years after independence. It shared the first Uzbek league title with Pakhtakor in 1992, then won the championship outright in 1993, 1994 and 1995. Under Yuriy Sarkisyan, who coached the club from the late Soviet period into the post-Soviet era, Neftchi became the first great provincial power of independent Uzbek football.

Bunyodkor Tashkent belongs to another category entirely. Founded in 2005 and rapidly transformed into a prestige project, it tried to make Uzbek football visible through money, infrastructure and global names. Rivaldo came. Zico coached. Luiz Felipe Scolari followed. Samuel Eto’o did not sign, but even the rumour was enough to make international media look at Tashkent. Bunyodkor’s story is brilliant and excessive, but also fragile. It showed both the attraction and the limits of football spectacle in late Karimov-era Uzbekistan.

These five clubs explain much of Uzbek football’s recent history. Pakhtakor is memory. Nasaf is regional achievement. Navbahor is passion. Neftchi is early independence power. Bunyodkor is ambition. But the map does not end there.

Also read on Novastan: Pakhtakor Tashkent: The Club That Carries Uzbek Football’s Memory

Lokomotiv Tashkent is the most obvious next point. Founded in 2002, the club is closely associated with Uzbekistan Railways, and its nickname, the Railroaders, gives it one of the clearest institutional identities in the country. Lokomotiv became especially important in the mid-2010s, when it broke through as a serious domestic force. After several seasons as runner-up, it won the Uzbek league in 2016, 2017 and 2018, turning a railway-backed club into one of the strongest teams of the period. If Bunyodkor was the glamour project, Lokomotiv was the state-company model in a more disciplined form: less spectacular, but highly effective for several years.

AGMK, from Almalyk, shows another version of the industrial club. Its name comes from the Almalyk Mining and Metallurgical Combine, the company that has been central to the club’s identity and sponsorship. Almalyk itself is one of Uzbekistan’s major industrial towns, associated with mining, metallurgy and copper. AGMK therefore belongs to the same broad family as Neftchi and Lokomotiv: clubs whose football identity is inseparable from a major economic institution. Its importance is not only sporting. It shows how Uzbek football has often developed through the relationship between local industry, company patronage and regional visibility.

Sogdiana Jizzakh gives the map a historical and regional dimension. Founded in 1970, the club takes its name from Sogdia, the ancient region that once connected Central Asia to wider Eurasian trade, culture and empire. In football terms, Sogdiana has rarely dominated Uzbekistan, but it has mattered as a durable provincial club. Its 1992 bronze medal in the first season of the independent Uzbek league and its 2021 runner-up finish show that Jizzakh has periodically produced teams capable of challenging the established hierarchy. Sogdiana is not a giant, but it gives Uzbek football one of its strongest historical names.

Mash’al Mubarek represents yet another kind of provincial football. Based in Mubarek, a town located in Kashkadarya associated with the gas industry, the club’s name means “torch”. That symbolism matters: in a football landscape full of cotton, oil, railways, metallurgy and construction, Mash’al carries the image of gas, flame and energy. Its greatest domestic achievement came in 2005, when it finished second in the Uzbek league behind Pakhtakor and qualified for the AFC Champions League. Mash’al has not become a permanent national power, but it remains a reminder that even smaller industrial towns have produced important chapters in Uzbek football.

Andijan brings the map back to the Fergana Valley. The club has not had the same national success as Navbahor or Neftchi, but it gives the Valley another emotional football centre. In many countries, football geography is not only shaped by champions. It is also shaped by cities whose clubs carry local loyalty through difficult seasons, relegations and returns. Andijan belongs to that category: a club whose importance is regional, social and emotional more than trophy-based. In the wider story of Uzbek football, it helps show why the Fergana Valley is not one football identity, but several competing city identities.

Surkhon Termez pushes the map south. Termez, on the Afghan border, occupies a very different place in Uzbekistan’s geography and imagination from Tashkent, Namangan or Qarshi. Surkhon’s role in Uzbek football is not primarily about trophies. It is about representation. A league that includes Termez is a league that reaches the country’s southern frontier, connecting football to a borderland city shaped by trade, military routes, religion, archaeology and proximity to Afghanistan. Surkhon gives Uzbek football a southern edge.

Also read on Novastan: Nasaf Qarshi: the club that put Uzbek football on Asia’s map

There are others too. Metallurg Bekabad (Tashkent region) reflects another industrial city and another metallurgy-linked identity. Kokand 1912 carries one of the oldest and most evocative city names in Uzbek football, rooted in the history of the Kokand Khanate and the Fergana Valley’s cultural geography. Qizilqum Zarafshon adds the mining landscape of the Kyzylkum desert and the gold-producing world of Navoi Region. Turon Yaypan (Fergana region) and other smaller clubs show how the football map continues to expand and contract as money, promotion, relegation and local support shift from season to season.

This diversity matters because Uzbek football is sometimes reduced to a national-team story or to a few famous names abroad. Shomurodov in Italy, Khusanov in England, Fayzullaev in Russia and other players in foreign leagues are now the most visible symbols of the country’s rise. But behind them stands a domestic structure that is more complicated than a simple talent pipeline. It includes Soviet legacies, regional pride, industrial sponsorship, state-company backing, academy projects, local administrations and fan cultures that vary sharply from city to city.

That structure has not always been stable. Uzbek clubs have often depended on powerful sponsors, state-linked companies or regional authorities. Budgets can rise and fall. Ownership can be opaque. Teams can surge quickly and decline just as quickly. Bunyodkor’s rise and fall showed the risks of spectacle. Neftchi’s long decline after its golden age showed how difficult it is to maintain dominance. Lokomotiv’s mid-2010s success showed how quickly a well-supported club can become a domestic force, but also how hard it is to turn a strong cycle into permanent mythology.

Yet this instability is also part of the story. Uzbek football has been built through experimentation. Some clubs have relied on memory. Some on fans. Some on factories. Some on railways. Some on academies. Some on local government. Some on the charisma of a coach or the ambition of a sponsor. The result is uneven, but it is not empty. It has produced institutions, rivalries and football environments that helped prepare the ground for the current generation.

Also read on Novastan: Discussions sur le développement du football féminin au Kazakhstan

The World Cup moment gives this domestic map new meaning. For years, Uzbekistan was one of Asian football’s nearly teams: technically strong, competitive, respected, but repeatedly falling short of the final step. Qualification changes the story. It allows the country to look back and ask not only which players made history, but which clubs, cities and football cultures helped make those players possible.

In that sense, the road to the World Cup did not begin only in national-team camps. It passed through Pakhtakor’s memory, Nasaf’s discipline, Navbahor’s crowds, Neftchi’s industrial Fergana, Bunyodkor’s academy fields, Lokomotiv’s railway-backed structure, AGMK’s metallurgical city, Sogdiana’s Jizzakh, Mash’al’s gas-town football, Andijan’s Valley loyalty and Surkhon’s southern frontier.

Uzbekistan’s football map is therefore not a straight line from Tashkent to the World Cup. It is a network. It runs through cotton, oil, gas, railways, mining towns, ancient cities, border regions and stadiums where local pride is turned into football identity. That is what makes the country’s first World Cup appearance more than a national-team success. It is the result of a football culture built across many Uzbekistans: capital and province, industry and academy, memory and ambition, spectacle and patience.

The next question is whether this moment can strengthen the clubs themselves. World Cup qualification can inspire young players, attract more attention to the domestic league, and make football more attractive to sponsors and families. But it can also widen the gap between the national team’s global visibility and the domestic league’s everyday realities. The challenge for Uzbekistan will be to use the World Cup not only as a celebration, but as a catalyst: better academies, better coaching, stronger governance, more transparent club structures and stadium cultures that can grow beyond occasional big matches.

If that happens, the clubs behind the World Cup dream will not remain only background stories. They will become part of Uzbekistan’s next football chapter. The country has reached the World Cup. Now its domestic game has to decide what kind of football nation it wants to become.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post Beyond the big clubs: the football map behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup dream appeared first on Novastan English.

Special series – The Clubs Behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup Dream

As Uzbekistan plays in its first-ever FIFA World Cup after a historic qualification campaign, Novastan looks at the clubs that shaped the country’s football identity. From Soviet-era Pakhtakor Tashkent to regional powerhouses such as Nasaf Qarshi, Navbahor Namangan and Neftchi Fergana, this series explores how club football helped build the foundations of the White Wolves’ rise.

In 2008, Uzbek football briefly became one of the strangest stories in the global game. A young Tashkent club, only three years old, claimed it was close to signing Samuel Eto’o from Barcelona, actually signed Rivaldo, hired Zico, and then brought in Luiz Felipe Scolari, Brazil’s 2002 World Cup-winning coach. Its name was Bunyodkor, meaning “creator” or “builder”, and for a few years it seemed to offer a new idea: that Uzbek football could force its way into international visibility through money, infrastructure and famous names.

Bunyodkor is unlike the other clubs in this series. Pakhtakor Tashkent carries Soviet memory and national tragedy. Nasaf Qarshi represents regional achievement and Asian success. Navbahor Namangan embodies popular passion in the Fergana Valley. Neftchi Fergana recalls the early years of independent Uzbek football. Bunyodkor belongs to a different category. It was not an old community club or a regional football institution. It was a project: fast, ambitious, spectacular and deeply tied to the political economy of late Karimov-era Uzbekistan.

The club was founded on 6 July 2005 as Neftgazmontaj-Quruvchi, usually shortened to Kuruvchi, meaning “builder”. The name reflected its origins in construction and energy-linked structures. In 2008, after rapid sporting success, the club was renamed Bunyodkor. The new name, often translated as “creator” or “builder”, suited its self-image. This was a club built quickly, with the aim of doing quickly what most football institutions take decades to achieve.

Its rise was immediate. After starting in the lower divisions, Bunyodkor moved rapidly through Uzbek football. It finished second in the 2007 Uzbek League, then won the championship in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013. It also won the Uzbek Cup four times, in 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013, and the Uzbek Super Cup in 2014. In less than a decade, it became one of the most decorated clubs of independent Uzbek football.

Also read on Novastan: Uzbekistan at the World Cup: The White Wolves Enter the Global Stage

But domestic success alone was not what made Bunyodkor famous. The turning point came in 2008, when the club tried to place itself in the global football conversation. The first episode was Samuel Eto’o. Kuruvchi publicly claimed that it had signed the Barcelona striker on a short-term contract. Eto’o travelled to Tashkent and gave a skills session, but the transfer never happened. Barcelona denied that a completed deal existed, and Eto’o remained in Europe. The episode mattered less because Eto’o played for the club – he did not – than because it showed Bunyodkor’s new method: using global football names to make the world look at Tashkent.

Rivaldo was different. He actually came. In August 2008, the Brazilian World Cup winner and former Ballon d’Or winner left AEK Athens for Bunyodkor. Reports described the contract as one of the most lucrative ever offered by a Central Asian club. For an Uzbek club, this was extraordinary. Rivaldo’s arrival gave Bunyodkor instant global recognition. For the first time, a club from Uzbekistan was not being discussed only in Asian football circles, but in the international sports press.

His presence was more than symbolic. Rivaldo played for Bunyodkor between 2008 and 2010, scored regularly and became the club’s international face. He brought glamour, but also credibility. The idea of an Uzbek club employing a player who had won the World Cup with Brazil and starred for Barcelona would have sounded impossible only a few years earlier. Bunyodkor made it real.

Also read on Novastan: Pakhtakor Tashkent: The Club That Carries Uzbek Football’s Memory

The club then added another Brazilian legend, this time on the bench. Zico arrived as head coach in September 2008. His stay was brief, but successful. Under him, Bunyodkor won the Uzbek league and cup double and reached the semi-finals of the AFC Champions League. That continental run was important because it showed that the project was not only spectacle. Bunyodkor could also compete seriously in Asia.

In 2009, the club went further by appointing Luiz Felipe Scolari. Scolari had led Brazil to the 2002 World Cup and had recently left Chelsea. In Tashkent, he was reunited with Rivaldo, one of the stars of his World Cup-winning Brazil side. His contract was reported to make him one of the world’s best-paid football managers at the time. Bunyodkor’s domestic dominance continued, but the experiment did not last. Scolari left in 2010, less than a year into his contract, and Rivaldo also departed that year.

The money behind this period remains central to the story. Officially, Bunyodkor’s early sponsors were linked to construction and oil-gas structures, and later to state-linked companies such as Uztransgaz. During the Rivaldo and Scolari years, international reporting connected the club’s big-spending model to the opaque political economy of Karimov-era Uzbekistan, including companies and elite networks close to the presidential family. The precise ownership and financing arrangements were never fully transparent, and that opacity is part of the club’s history. Bunyodkor was not only a football club with rich sponsors; it was a product of a specific political moment, when energy money, elite business networks, international branding and football spectacle briefly came together.

When the money became less reliable, the illusion of unlimited ambition faded quickly. Rivaldo later pursued unpaid wages. Scolari left. Zeromax ran into serious trouble. Bunyodkor remained an important Uzbek club, but the era when it could plausibly attract Brazil’s biggest football names was over.

The club’s stadium tells a parallel story. Bunyodkor initially played at smaller Tashkent venues, including the MHSK and JAR stadiums. In 2012, the new Bunyodkor Stadium opened in Tashkent with a capacity of around 34,000 spectators. Later renamed Milliy Stadium, although the Bunyodkor name has remained closely associated with the venue, it became one of Uzbekistan’s main football arenas and an important home for the national team. The stadium gave the club a physical monument to its ambitions: modern, large and clearly designed to project national football confidence.

Bunyodkor’s nicknames also reveal how it wanted to be seen. The club is commonly known as Qaldirg‘ochlar, “the Swallows”, a nickname that gives it a more elegant and modern identity than the industrial or regional names of many older Uzbek clubs. It has also been called the “Asian Barcelona”, a label linked to the club’s attempted relationship with Barcelona, its Brazilian stars and its dream of becoming a stylish continental power. These labels matter because Bunyodkor was always more than a team on the pitch. It was also a brand, a projection of ambition and a claim that Uzbek football could belong in a wider global conversation.

Also read on Novastan: Nasaf Qarshi: the club that put Uzbek football on Asia’s map

Yet Bunyodkor’s fan identity is more complicated than that of clubs such as Navbahor or Neftchi. Navbahor has the emotional weight of Namangan. Neftchi has Fergana’s industrial memory and early independence dominance. Pakhtakor has generations of Soviet and post-Soviet supporters. Bunyodkor is younger and more constructed. Its fans are mostly Tashkent-based and linked to a newer football culture: urban, stadium-centred, and associated with the club’s years of success rather than with decades of inherited loyalty.

This does not mean the club lacks supporters. Bunyodkor’s rise, stars, stadium and trophies gave it visibility, especially among younger fans in Tashkent. But its supporter culture has never carried the same mythology as Pakhtakor’s tragedy, Navbahor’s packed stands in Namangan or Neftchi’s Sarkisyan-era memory. Bunyodkor’s fan base is a product of modern Uzbek football: newer, more media-driven, and shaped by success, branding and academy football.

The club’s place in popular culture is also different. Pakhtakor has been celebrated in songs and public memory. Navbahor’s culture lives strongly through supporters, fan pages and stadium chants. For Bunyodkor, there does not appear to be a clearly documented famous pop song comparable to Pakhtakor’s songs by well-known Uzbek performers. Its pop-cultural footprint comes instead from spectacle: the astonishing arrival of Rivaldo, the Eto’o episode, Scolari in Tashkent, the “Asian Barcelona” label, and the image of a club that briefly made Uzbekistan visible in global football gossip.

That may be Bunyodkor’s most distinctive cultural role. It did not enter Uzbek popular culture mainly through music or folklore. It entered it through headlines. For a few years, the club made people ask: how could Rivaldo be in Tashkent? Could Eto’o really come? Why was Scolari coaching in Uzbekistan? Bunyodkor became a football story that sounded almost unreal, and that unreality was part of its appeal.

Also read on Novastan: Discussions sur le développement du football féminin au Kazakhstan

There were also real footballers behind the spectacle. Mirjalol Qosimov, one of Uzbekistan’s great football figures, coached the club before and after the Brazilian era and helped give it a domestic football identity. Server Djeparov, one of the best Uzbek players of his generation and a two-time Asian Footballer of the Year, played for Bunyodkor. Rivaldo brought global fame, but players like Qosimov and Djeparov connected the club to Uzbek football’s own hierarchy of talent and authority.

Bunyodkor also became part of the careers of players who now define Uzbekistan’s World Cup generation. Eldor Shomurodov played for Bunyodkor from 2015 to 2017 before moving to Rostov in Russia, the transfer that opened the path to Serie A and later to his role as Uzbekistan’s captain. Abdukodir Khusanov, now one of the most internationally visible Uzbek players after his move to Manchester City, also passed through Bunyodkor’s academy before leaving for Belarus and then moving through Lens to English football. In this sense, Bunyodkor’s future may be more important than its past glamour: not as a club that buys stars, but as a club that helps produce them.

This is where the hope for the future lies. Bunyodkor is unlikely to repeat the Rivaldo-Scolari moment. That period belonged to a specific political and financial environment that no longer exists in the same form. But the club still has assets that matter: a recognised name, a major stadium environment, an academy tradition, experience in Asian competitions and a place in the capital’s football ecosystem. If it builds from youth development rather than spectacle, Bunyodkor can remain important to Uzbek football in a more sustainable way.

The club’s recent position suggests a more modest but potentially healthier phase. It is no longer the overwhelming force of 2008-2013, and it no longer looks like a club trying to buy global attention. But that may not be a weakness. Bunyodkor’s next chapter could be less glamorous and more useful: developing young players, competing domestically, returning to Asian relevance and contributing to the national team’s talent pipeline.

That would also change the meaning of its name. “Bunyodkor” means builder. In the late 2000s, the club tried to build international prestige from the top down, with money, names and spectacle. In the future, it may have to build differently: from academy fields, coaching structures, scouting and patience.

This is why Bunyodkor belongs in a series about the clubs behind Uzbekistan’s World Cup dream. Not because it is the deepest-rooted club in the country, and not because its big-money years offer a model to copy. It matters because it shows one of the boldest and most contradictory experiments in Uzbek football history. It brought global attention to Tashkent. It produced real trophies. It reached the AFC Champions League semi-finals. It revealed the risks of opaque money and prestige politics. And, through players such as Shomurodov and Khusanov, it still connects to the generation carrying Uzbekistan onto the World Cup stage.

Pakhtakor is memory. Nasaf is regional achievement. Navbahor is passion. Neftchi is early independence power. Bunyodkor is ambition – brilliant, excessive, fragile, and still unfinished.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

The post Bunyodkor Tashkent: the prestige project that tried to put Uzbek football on the world map appeared first on Novastan English.